DD is fine I guess as long as new games are released at a $10 price point.

what happens when the physical media shatters inside your player. This happened to me recently when a disc that had become brittle and then shattered destroyer the player.

Come on, how often does that happen? Oh, it was your first time and also your last in many, many years? I thought so.

Or lose all your media in a house fire. Or more realistically, :: dun dun dun! :: lose all your media during a move when a shipping company drops the ball. It can happen.

There are a lot of advantages to DD games and media and one of the big fears (losing your files) is a real simple fix: back up your files. It's the same thing you'd do for any file you didn't want to lose.

I keep back ups of most of my Steam games (the ones I'd want to immediately install on other systems) and other DD purchased games. It's the same thing as having installer discs. If you're that paranoid, you can keep them on an external drive in a safe or remote server or wherever.

But yes, I will fully acknowledge that there is something to be said about having physical media for immediate access. To just pop in a game and play it rather than have to reload or reinstall if you don't want to store hundreds of GB of games on a given computer.

It's really only in rarer instances when someone has literally hundreds of game cases and discs that managing them becomes a logistical issue, particularly if you're not planning on living in the same house or apartment or wherever for the rest of your life.

If you like displaying your library of games on a shelf that's fine too, but I'd argue that most people probably don't fall into this category. Gamers are not some fringe group of collection obsessed people these days; they're a much broader group, and most care more about the experience than keeping the collection and their old games.

If you have an installer file (which DD on PC will always provide) you can install a game on any compatible operating system whenever.

It is a lot different on closed platforms like gaming consoles though, and a legitimate concern.

I'm assuming (really big assumption on my part) that all my PSN and XBL content will be available on future PS or Xbox consoles using my same User accounts, which are in many ways more valuable than the physical console.

But if for whatever reason, the PS3 content or 360/Xbox content isn't compatible with the next generation of consoles, then that's why people hang on to old hardware. Hell, if your old games matter that much to you or you have that many, you should probably have an extra console or two in storage to play those games if you ever want to again.

Of course the last concern applies to physical media as well.

Same here man. I love my collections.

I just downloaded my first game ever off of psn today (still downloading), and it is FFIX.  While it feels a little different not to "own" the game so to speak, it is nice that I am able to do this with older games, not to mention it is cheaper to download ($9.99), then it is to buy used on amazon after shipping.  I just don't want to do this with newer games.  The file size of like 1.2 gb is also a little hefty for my internet.  We have like 1.5 mb internet, and the estimated download time at the start was like 4-5 hours, and it's looking like it will take that long.

Downloading huge newer games really wouldn't be something I would enjoy to say the least.

DLC is okay but I can not pay for a full game if it's not on physical media.

I am so happy to see that more people would rather "OWN" their copies then have a digital copy of the game. To me it just seems like I dont own the game that I have digital. I love to see my shelves full of games and proudly display my games.

There are a lot of assumptions when buying stuff off XBL or PSN.

If you really wanted to err on the safe side, consider everything you buy to be a write off once the platform is no longer being supported, meaning your only "copies" will be whatever you have installed on any consoles before support is dropped.

There's no way to make non hardware locked back ups on the PS3 either. PSN back ups (or just PS3 back ups in general) are tied to specific consoles, making them worthless if anything happens to the orginal console on which they were installed.

XBL allows the copying/transferring of XBL games although the license remains tied to the original gamer tag on which they were purchased.

Of course if any of these games aren't compatible with future consoles, it doesn't really matter either way if they'll be available on servers "for all infinity" or not, which is of course a pretty silly assumption.