Arstechnica: Physical console games are quickly becoming a relatively niche market

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super_etecoon said:

Digital makes sense on so many levels, but the greatest factor for me is ease of use. I love Rocket League, but only in small doses of 2-5 games. So it’s easy just to go from my main game, to Rocket League, to another small game, then back to the main title I’m playing.

There’s also the environmental factor. No plastic case, no production elements, no shipping.

Now it would be nice if digital owners got a small discount in addition to zero tax, but price isn’t a factor either way. If either the digital or physical title were priced differently it wouldn’t affect my buying habits.

I do think that it is good that the physical editions exist for collectors, purists, and archivers, but for this generation I’ve opted to follow the digital trend and I just can’t see myself going back. Unless they come up with some sort of disk changer or cart changer that holds 10-15 games at a time that I can switch on the fly.

Digital really become my primary means of games purchasing as soon as soon as full games installs became required to play any of the games. On PC this meant as soon as my internet was good enough I was mostly digital, on console this meant that the Xbox 360 was the last device in which most of the games I bought for it were physical. On the way home from school I could just pop over to GameStop, buy a game, get home and put it in the console, and play immediately. With full game installs becoming mandatory, physical just became digital with an extra step. 

I still buy physical when there is a good deal, but from a purely technological standpoint physical games distribution seems fully obsolete