Um, there are lots of upsides.

Selection is better. There are lots of digital only games. I love having a list of games available and I can just hit one and it loads right up. It's not about avoiding the "hassle" of swapping discs it's about the convenience of not having to worry about changing discs. You also don't have to deal with keeping your library organized and clean. And if I check the store and see a game I want, bam, I own it. No need to get underwear on and go out. Also loads of sales nowadays. Hasn't hit Steam levels pricing yet but consoles have come a long way.

More and more are agreeing with me :)

You can add to that the fact that having your game digitally means you are future proofing your ownership of the rights to that game in perpetuity.

Again, you don't own anything with digital, as per United States federal law. You're effectively leasing the game, but the copyright holder still owns the game and they are the ones that retain all the rights associated with ownership.

If you travel you also have access to your full library of games no matter where in the world you are.

I might give you that one, but I can't imagine that many people would spend so much time away from home that they'd want to haul their console along with them.

For people living in big cities, the space to store physical goods is also an important factor. As time goes by, there's no good reason to reserve a ton of space for an ever growing library of games you gather.

Unless you live in an apartment the size of a walk-in closet and buy every game that comes out, space ought to not be an issue. I have 31 physical games for the current generation, which take up a whopping 1-½ feet of shelf space. Those cases really are behemoths, I tell you.

Also the fact that physical copies are redundant, the disc is simply a means to deliver the goods (game data) to your machine. If you already have the digital copy in your drive or fast enough internet connection, why would you need other moving parts with limited life?

Physical copies are not redundant as long as conference of ownership and the rights associated with ownership are restricted to physical media. Nor are they redundant for availability purposes. A game that is delisted from a digital storefront is gone forever unless it gets relisted, which is not guaranteed thanks to various factors like rights issues keeping it gone or the platform no longer being supported. Meanwhile, a physical copy will be around for a lifetime, and something you missed out on years ago that's long out of print is still in principle able to be purchased.

Cutting the middle man is also another reason. Why should 15/20% of what I pay go to someone whose entire task is transporting and storing a useless piece of plastic for me? Even if prices are the same i much rather support the people who actually created the game with my money than give a cut to an irrelevant middle man.

The platform holder is technically a middle man, at least when it comes to third-party titles. Besides, it's not like you don't have to deal with middle men everywhere else. Any goods sold in a store that aren't the store's brand are effectively "third-party" goods. And besides, new software is a very low-margin product for retailers.

Convenience... Being able to browse a list of games and jumping between them until you hit the one that speaks to you in the moment. 

I don't find browsing my shelves particularly inconvenient. I've been dealing with physical copies for well over 30 years and never once felt it was a bother.

More environmentally friendly. Less carbon footprint on producing plastics, transportation costs in ships and trucks, etc.

The environmental savings would be utterly minuscule. I can't imagine the CO2 footprint of physical games is any appreciable fraction of the total.

All the issues you currently find with digital can and will be addressed as we transition to a much more digital future. The EU has begun looking into transfer of digital rights. Its a matter of time until popular demand and legislation will regulate more strongly the consumer rights. This takes time, but its going to happen finally.

And if it doesn't? Has there ever been any indication that copyright holders just won't get their way? I mean, the first-sale rule has never applied to digital, and there's no reason to think it will stop. Will there ever be a big enough pushback to have the first-sale doctrine apply to digital? I somehow doubt it. The U.S. is not the EU. IP law here is a total shitshow. And as the U.S. Copyright Office explains it:

"The underlying policy of the first sale doctrine as adopted by the courts was to give effect to the common law rule against restraints on the alienation of tangible property. The tangible nature of a copy is a defining element of the first sale doctrine and critical to its rationale. The digital transmission of a work does not implicate the alienability of a physical artifact. When a work is transmitted, the sender is exercising control over the intangible work through its reproduction rather than common law dominion over an item of tangible personal property. Unlike the physical distribution of digital works on a tangible medium, such as a floppy disk, the transmission of works interferes with the copyright owner's control over the intangible work and the exclusive right of reproduction. The benefits to further expansion simply do not outweigh the likelihood of increased harm."

TL;DR, according to Title 17 § 109 of U.S. Code, you own your physical books, CDs, tapes, DVDs/Blurays, and, yes, console games, but current judicial precedent does not apply the first-sale rule to digital.

It's progress... don't be shy, just embrace it :)

It's not progress to me. Not every piece of technology is deserving of being labeled "progress." And I'm not going to embrace it as long as the law is what it is. I believe in owning things.

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.

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.

We'll agree to disagree I guess. We have radically opposite views on this subject.

The only point I wanted to make 100% clear, I'm not advocating an extinction of physical media at all costs. I think it should exist for as long as there's enough demand for it.

Well, I have seen a lot of digital-only evangelists out there who are at least implicitly hoping for the demise of physical media. To hear some of them talk, the disc manufacturing plants and the printing presses would have all been shut down by now and that we'd all be better off for it "for reasons." If you're fine with the continued existence of physical, then good. If someone wants to go all-digital, I don't have a problem with that. If they have their reasons, then whatever.

My beef is with people who insist that digital is always better and that we'll be better off without physical. I've seen enough BS over the years to where I've avoided paid digital downloads as much as possible (I'll take something for free if they're offering, though). Since 2010 I've maybe spent a total of $50 on digital games (Perfect Dark HD, Mega Man 10, several VC releases, and most recently Blaster Master Zero) vs. probably $1800 on physical (assuming an average of $50 spent per game; I often wait several months for the price to drop and only buy new on day one for games I'm really, really interested in).

All I really want is an option next time around to buy a console without any disk drive. Saving me in the short term by not having to include hardware I won't use, but also not forcing anyone else to go full digital as I do.

My pc hasn't had an optical drive for... i wanna say 12/13 years now... and I do a big hardware revision every 2/3 years. So if it works for PCs, why wouldn't it work for consoles?

A console's optical drive costs no more than $30 according to various teardowns I've seen, and while you might save a bit a cash if that slightly reduced cost is passed down to the consumer, that's not guaranteed as it could cost the console makers more to continually have a drive-less version of every primary SKU. People usually buy gaming PCs piece by piece to make their own builds to their own preferred specifications (though some companies offer entire rigs, usually with a high mark-up), whereas a console is a single unit manfactured en masse, each standard current-production model identical except for the hard drive size. It really ought to go without saying that PCs and console are rarely translatable to each other on a 1:1 basis. They are very different markets.

Also, the PSP Go, the first and to date only console or handheld SKU to lack physical media, costing just as much as a regular PSP doesn't bode well to the prospect of a digital-only console costing the consumer less.

Would it be nice for someone who doesn't want a disc drive to have a drive-less SKU as an option? Yeah. Would it be cheaper for the consumer who wants to go all-digital or practical for the manufacturer? Maybe, but not likely.