Pemalite said:
Plenty of games are "locked" behind online access and thus were rendered unplayable.
Sure. But the difference there is that if the NAND/HDD fails (Which is a matter of when not if!) you loose your entire games library in one fell swoop. - That doesn't happen with Physical.
All my Physical media works. |
Not disgareeing with you, however my point before is nothing last forever. The mentally of owning physical games because it last forever is not true as everything has a life span especially media formats.
I cannot speak on behalf of console business models as there main strategy is to close and move on to there next product basically with the mentally of "upgrade or be left behind". However I am quite confident that Live and PSN are adopting a similar approach to Steam this gen which will carry onto there next products etc unifiying there eco-systems into one big platform. If someone is buying games on a not-so-well establishment than closures are more than likely to happen eventually.
Hardware is also likely to fail on gamers over time and considering Physical media is very reliant on hardware this only makes physical media more likely to have issues. Games can be scratched and eaten by disk drives, old cartridge style games do deteriorate over time aswell unlike Digital. Most of my Atari 2600 games barely work but if they were digital they will work every time like they were brand new. That's basically my point. Digital can actually last you longer than phyiscal if the game remains on the store front and like I mentioned before, its incredibly rare that a game you brought on a well known establishment like Steam, Live and PSN will be taken down.. I know there have be one offs here and there on those platforms however again its the only issue you have to worry about with digital. And if they did take the game down and you brought it, you can actually complain and claim a case with your digital receipt.
Like I said before, my Steam games all work like there brand new while my Atari, NES, PS1 and SNES games struggle, some work fine, some have been damaged over the course of time and some clearly don't work at all. I own Warhammer Online collectors edition and that games server has been closed, with the disk or not the game wont work period. So if you are in the business to collect, than physical makes sense but if you are in the business for last ability than choose your poison because both have advantages and disadvantages BUT I say Digital have very little disadvantages than Physical and I say this as a 15 year Steam user.
