56% of For Honors Sales Are Digital(NPD)

[Normchacho]

Shadow1980 said:

Normchacho said:

Considering the current strength and vibrancy of the indie/retro-style market I think it's a little silly to just write them off because they don't come in a box.

Honestly I haven't been too impressed by much of what I've seen, but then again I'm not easy to impress. At least not enough to plunk down $10-20 on something I'm not even sure I'll like with no ability to get a refund or sell off the copy. Incidentally, several of the ones that interested me the most ended up getting physical copies (Shantae and Shovel Knight come to mind).

You talk a lot about laziness but it's not just about that. Convience isn't a bad thing though you seem to disagree with that point. So...How is hand washing your dishes and clothes?

Strawman. We're talking about saving a few seconds by not switching discs, not something that actually does involve considerable time and energy like handwashing does. Switching out discs literally takes only 20-30 seconds.

Physical games also...you know...take up physical space.

See my reply to setsunatenshi above to see my comments regarding the space argument.

You need to actually purchase something to hold them and find somewhere to put them. That's not nothing.

I can spend $30 on a simple rack that would take me over a decade to completely fill up and takes up less than two square feet of floor space. If you can't afford that then buying video games isn't on your list of priorities.

Not to mention that a physical game can be damaged, lost, or stolen.

And hard drives can fail. And if that happens after the platform is no longer supported? You really think your PS4 or XBO will still connect to their respective digital stores 20 years from now? After my little incident with the original Xbox, I don't trust this to not happen. At least if my a physical copy is damaged (not going to happen because I take care of my stuff), lost (see the previous), or stolen (fat chance), there are other copies out that that be purchased, even many years after the title has gone out of print. Can't say the same thing about certain digital titles.

Oh, and in order for a download to take 6 hours at 30 mb/s you're looking at a 75gb download. Plus, internet speed improves all the time. I live in a sleepy little town with 200 mb/s internet, welcome to 2017.

Lucky you. My supposedly 30 mbps connection is in practice much slower that what Comcast advertises. Updates that should take at most an hour typically take me several times that. A 50GB game would take literally all day instead of, say, 4 hours, but even that 4 hours is much less than the 30 minutes it takes for me to drive to GameStop or Wal-Mart and back home.

Then, there's the fact that two people can play together online using one digital copy of a game.

Uh huh. And? I hardly play anything online.

There's also the prospect of console makers no longer needing to account for the packaging and cost of a disc drive, developers and publishers not having to account for the cost of printing, packaging, shipping, deciding how many units and where to ship them. Can you think of a better thing for those companies to be using that money on? Making games, perhaps? Providing a better performace/cost ratio on the next batch of consoles?

Eliminating discs would save at most $4 per copy in manufacturing and distribution costs. If eliminating the costs associated with physical media was that beneficial, the music industry would have, quite a few years ago, told music listeners that they'd better start buying mp3 players or do without. No segment of the entertainment industry has yet to force all-digital, even in a market like music that is heavily lopsided in favor of digital.

Does it matter if you specifically don't care for an entire section of the gaming market just because of the way they are distributed? Do you get to decide if these games count?

 

Once again with this "Well it doesn't matter to ME!" Who cares if you only buy like three games a year. I own like...90 PS4 games not including PS+ games. For me to store all of those physically would be a pretty big hassle. The point of course being that just because you personally aren't impacted by an issue doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Hard drives can fail, but you can also backup digital media. I personally have 2 backups of all of my PS4 saved data and in the next couple of months will have a backup of all of my PS4 games aswell. When a physical game is gone, it's gone. Every couple of years upgrade your drives (which most tech savy people are likely to do regardless) and you can hold onto digital games forever.

My point about internet speeds is that they are getting faster all the time. By the end of the decade GB internet will be common in the United States and downloading games (even as they grow) will take less and less time. The speed of internet is increasing faster than the size of video games.

It doesn't matter if you don't play online. The ability for more than one person to use a single copy of a game at the same time is a big plus.

Getting rid of physical media would save a ton of money. Sure, $4 for distribution, but then you need to ad the $15 for retailers, and $7 for buying back unsold inventory. That's $26 of each $60 game that only exists because of physical media. You could fund an extra AAA game for every 2 million retail games sold just by skipping the physical copy.

Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html