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

[burninmylight]

Zones said:

zeldazero said:
To me the biggest problem with digital is the fact that it is almost inevitable that eventually your digital purchase will no longer be available to you with no kind of reimbursement. Can anyone tell me with complete certainty that if I buy a game that it will be available for me to re-download for the rest of my life as long as I own the console I bought it on. Basically, in 20 years, do you think I will still have the ability to download a digital game I bought on the PS3 when the PS8 comes out? I highly doubt it.

Has your iTunes music library from a decade ago disappeared? Well same exact thing will be true for digital games purchases.

Of course, in the instance of a company completely failing in their gaming sector and basically going out of business without selling the division beforehand, you may lose all your digital purchases. Likewise, for both Sony and MS, if your account is banned for some reason, they will disallow you from redownloading your own games, which is a completely archiac move on their part, and unless more people call them out on this, they will most like not change that rule.

 

That's not the case with Steam though; your games are yours forever to redownload regardless of anything that may happen to your account.

Exactly. So long as you download the game and it doesn't require the need to phone home or connect the Internet in any manner just to play, you have nothing to worry about.

Also, I bought Donky Kong Country from the Wii VC before Nintendo had to take the DKC games off of the service. Even though someone who never purchased the game through VC before does not have the ability to get the game now, I can delete and redownload the game as many times as I want, because I already purchased the license to the game.