Digital VS Physical

[SvennoJ]

It's quite different from my perspective

Azzanation said:

Benefits of owning Digital

No Discs
- Can't leave the kids alone with the ps4 as they'll start gta5 and other M rated stuff

Cheaper Consoles (No disc drives required)
- Yet they'll need a bigger HDD, same price

Faster load times
- Incorrrect, load times would be faster when loading from disc and hdd install simultaeneously
However since everything is installed nowadays there is no difference, except for the faster install time from disc

Less house space

Access to entire Library
- Same with physical

Cheaper games
- Not here, physical is still $68, new digital releases are up to $80 now (Canada)
Plus guaranteed half price back for physical within the first month.

Able to download games on any machine (account based)
- You can put the disc in any machine too, no account or download required

No Discs/Drive maintenance
- I've had more HDD failures than optical disc failures.

Benefits of owning Physical

Install off the disc
- Huge benefit, don't need extra HDD space or worry about $2 per GB internet overage charge.

Ownership of a game
- Biggest benefit, can choose to keep, sell or give away.

Resale Value
- Yep, can basically play games for half price at release or buy cheap 2nd hand games.

 

Now those reasons to own physical aren’t exactly great compared to the reasons to own digital and if you’re someone who loves your games and don’t plan on reselling them, it sort of makes it useless. The fact you need an online account now to use your hardware and half of the game is only accessible online now with paywalls has really made it pointless to own it on disc in my opinion.

If anyone wants to add to my list feel free, I know there’s more with physical but I just can’t think of any.

Other benefits of physical is the extras. The witcher 3 came with a useful map and some other goodies.
As I already said, easier to keep the M-rated games out of reach of my kids.
It feels a lot nicer to put a new game in the machine than to wait for a download. With a digital library I just keep looking at what else is there, hence my Steam library is mostly unplayed. Having to get up to change games has its benefits! (I have the same problem with Netflix. Stick in a blu-ray and I watch it all the way, watch of Netflix and I'll be browsing for something better 20 minutes in)

The biggest reason is still trust. Having a physical copy of the game guarantees ownership. Digital I'm not so sure. It's also easier to keep a physcial library. Steam is nice, yet I also have games on Origin, GoG and a bunch direct from developers, leaving me with a bunch of accounts and passwords to keep track of. I'm kinda over digital, it got too messy for my liking.