setsunatenshi said:
Hard to do on a phone but ok...
1- i'm not bound by US law. Everything i purchase digitally is mine as long as I have a receipt for it. I can make as many copies of it as I want and keep them forever
Well I am, and U.S. law makes digital an bad deal overall.
2- ok you conceded that point so no point arguing how prevalent or not it may me. For me is relevant as i effectively live in a country different than the one i was born and do travel quite a bit.
3- i do live in a 2 room apartment with my gf, so space is an issue. Also i own way more than 31 games. I probably have installed on my ps4 more than 31 at any given time. Not mentioning all my past console games collections as well as pc.i would need a new room if i was to store a physical copy of every game I have.
For both of the above points, your individual living circumstances may compel you to feel that digital is more convenient, but don't think that makes digital a better deal overall for everyone and something the entire market should move exclusively towards. Not everybody lives in a tiny-ass apartment, not everyone owns dozens upon dozens of games on every system (the PS4's attach rate is about 7.5 games/system currently), and not everyone travels on a frequent basis. For the average console gamer living the States, digital is no better than physical, and in many ways is worse.
4- again... physical copy of the game is eternal you can save it to as many storage units as you want.
As far as I'm aware of you can't make multiple copies of digital console games. You can transfer your data to another storage unit, when upgrading a hard drive or whatever, but you can't just have multiple extra copies lying around in the event of an inevitable hard drive failure.
A disc is bound to be lost, broken, scratched.
Not if you take care of your stuff. Not a single lost or damaged game in over 30 years. Every disc is in utterly pristine condition, looking just as new as when it was bought. Not a difficult task, either.
The console that plays said disc can get the drive broken, etc. If any of that happens you lose your game. I wont.
I had an OXbox disc drive jam. Retrieving the disc that was in there only required a few minutes with a screwdriver. Now, what if your console is no longer supported by its manufacturer (like the original Xbox) and the hard drive fails? Remember, you're not really backing anything up on consoles, so your digital games exist on only one storage unit at a time.
5- the platform holder creates the piece of hardware that allows said game to be played. They support thr platform which makes it possible for 3rd parties to actually thrivr on said platform. They invest in new technologies that push gaming forward. All of this to me is worth of my investment way more than a middle man that is only there to add overhead with nothing positive to add. The reason why games take longer to release aftet going gold is due to physical copies having to be made and distributed worldwide. Nothing more.
Individual games used to be, or at least in principle should have been, a lot more profitable out of the box because, even though manfacturing costs were higher, development costs were dirt cheap compared to today. Yet with dev costs of less than a million dollars (a benefit of taking less than a year and a dozen people to make a game), many games and companies still managed to fail, and those lower dev costs didn't translate to a larger variety of games. While games cost more to make today, the market is larger than ever, and the advent of DLC, which is a low-cost, high-margin product, has generated billions in additional revenue, yet I see nothing but complaints from gamers and continued corporate shenanigans. What makes you think cutting out the middle man is going to make things better for gamers? There is absolutely no reason to think that cutting out the costs associated with retail will translate to nothing more than extra profit pocketed by the platform holders and publishers, with no resulting benefits for gamers and no end to the bullshit we've dealt with for decades. If anything, the bullshit will get worse in an all-digital world.
6- you dont find incovenient, but you can admit that is way more convenient to have all the games loaded and ready to play. So even if its a matter of degrees of inconvenience, digital has the edge obviously
I don't agree with that at all. Again, you're arguing that minuscule time savings are enough to justify digital-only. I don't find that argument valid.
7- the plastic used for millions and millions of game cases, discs, transportation, etc. All this represent an added cost that has no reason to exist and it has an environmental.impact.
Everything has an environmental impact. No exceptions. Civilizations far smaller and more primitive than us managed to do a lot of damage. The burden of proof is for you to show that making physical console games has a statistically significant negative impact compared to other things humans do. Trying to green-guilt-trip me isn't going to work, and I'm someone who thinks global warming is real and a serious threat. I imagine someone's gaming habit is down towards the bottom of the list of things that have an effect on the environment.
8- again im not bound by US law. World >> US. If for some reason a digital good wouldnt be recognized as mine after i purchased it by some law, #1 i already have the game and if not, #2 i would "pirate" it
And I'm telling you how things are for me and 318 million other Americans. So you're not an American and your country has pro-consumer IP laws that treats digital media as a product that is owned by the end-user? Well hooray for you. Still sucks for us over here and it's not about to change any time soon. Also, I don't need to pirate anything with physical, because when something goes out of print there's still copies out there to be bought. There's a flourishing second-hand market for console games old and new.
9- its just as much progress as tape to cd and cd to mp3. Convenience and lower cost beats all
I don't own an MP3 player, and I still buy CDs on occasion (not as much as I used to because newer music doesn't appeal to me much). But music is consumed quite differently than other forms of entertainment, including video games. The basic unit is the song, not the album, and music is a passive medium that is frequently listened to on the go (broadcast radio is still the top format), both factors that result in music lending itself more favorably to digital than other forms of entertainment. Personally, I never felt the need to carry hundreds of songs with me when I'm out jogging or whatever, and whenever I'm driving I just listen to the radio or a CD. Oh, and digital music, at least in the U.S., isn't any cheaper than CDs on a cost-per-song basis.
Also, the music industry didn't see declining physical sales and say "Well, we're going all-digital so you better get used to it." If anybody would have done it by now it would have been them. Yet we still have choices. There's mp3s, digital subscriptions, satellite subscriptions, CDs, vinyl, and good old free radio (which is still the most popular means of listening to music). You have Netflix and DVD & Blu-ray rentals & purchases, plus theaters are still where most notable films debut. You have print books and eBooks (the former still by and far the preferred means of consuming literature). But a digital-only console would remove that choice. It would be forcing gamers to either abandon physical media or do without gaming entirely if they refuse to go along with it. And the fact that some gamers would be perfectly fine with this forced removal of choice galls me.
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