A major part of the digital/physical debate that people forget

[gigantor21]

Zones said:

gigantor21 said:
Digital makes it far easier to enact all the licensing restrictions that the industry so badly want to enforce. That's why MS wanted to push their restrictive DRM on used game sales so much in the first place. Streaming services like PSNow, which "#4thegamers" Sony wants to make the standard for content delivery, would be even worse. Physical grants me as a consumer far more ownership over the game I paid for, regardless of what the licensing agreement says on paper.

PlayStation Now is not much different from music services like Spotify, Beats, and Sony's own Music Unlimited service. The same thing is happening with movies and Netflix.

 

The underlying repeating theme is that most people are reluctant to change at first, then very slowly they adapt to newer forms of media consumptions without ever admitting being unreasonably stubborn at first place. I am somewhat certain a lot of people who shit on PSNow at this time would be more than glad to pay a one time subscription fee per year to play games only three months old without even needing to purchase a gaming system to play them. Then of course all this unnecessary 'ownership' speech will go out of the window and most would pretend they had welcomed this future with open arms.

You're making an awful lot of assumptions there.

I wasn't anywhere near as apprehensive about, say, online multiplayer, or the move from cartridges to discs, or the introduction of anlog sticks for 3-d games. In all of those cases, the benefits far outweighed the potential downsides. Streaming services don't sound anywhere near as beneficial; the potential for lag and network downtime locking me out even in single player titles doesn't sound very enticing at any price, assuming that the pricing and offerings for such a service would be good in the first place. Even with digital downloads, I'm far more price conscious than I would be for phyiscal copy because of the inability to resell games I don't like and recoup the investment.

Some changes are just better than others.