lol, "you missed the 11, 12 and 13 payments from your 48x deal for GTA VII, so you'll bring it back to us within 3 days or else..."

Reminded me of renting games back in the day.

Well, both for financing and renting you need to have the system to play it (you could finance or rent the system too, lol), so I guess they would rather focus on the cloud for streaming instead, and Stadia 2 will turn out to be the most successful gaming platform of all time.

Sadly I can't rule out this joke post actually being impossible tho...

I would have voted Always...but only a Sith deals in absolutes.

I do my very best in this day and age to support quality titles that take the time and expense to release on physical.  I waited a long time for LRG to bring DOOM Eternal to Switch because physical is that important to me over digital and I am a small time collector.  I have waited for Silksong and R-Type 3 to get the physical release also.  Of course, there are times when physical is not an option and I felt like the dev deserves support and I have purchased digital for the likes of Shin'en's Fast Fusion and Nano Assault Neo.

Physical games...

Not really sure where this majority doesnt care about physical argument comes from. Because of Fortnite? Overwatch? Or what else that never got a physical release to begin with? Just because many people play games that never got a physical release, doesnt mean they dont prefer physical. Lets see what Pokemon Winds/Waves do physical vs digital. Or Marvels Wolverine. If digital surpasses 50%, then fair enough. Unless someone has a good example of a game that got a physical and a digital release on the same day and the digital did better?

If a game had a physical version, that's what I got 100% of the time. If it didn't, I would buy it if I thought it was good enough. But the latter was rare, and usually on small, indie type of games (Super Meat Boy, Minecraft, Braid etc.)

I have had this debate for years over the subject of physical vs digital. And honestly, none of us are any authority to lecture others how they should or should not collect / play their games. I can only speak for myself and say i support both. I used to have a very large and diverse selection of physical media over the years. And it really just takes up too much space. then you have the issue of what to choose to play... it got out of hand (for me). I pretty much downsized the games from the 7th gen and previous. i still keep select ones in my collection, but otherwise the only physical media I support are flash carts, hard drives and SD cards full of the games that once were sitting on my shelves. And even though some would argue that isnt physical... i can say otherwise. i am able to hold those devices in my hand, they are real physical objects.

When it comes to more modern games, i do buy both digital (sales are more plentiful on steam, nintendo eshop and xb/ps stores) and the occasional physical release if its something I just want to buy and keep sealed. I have plenty of games like that. I also like to use services such as gamepass and PS+ premium to play games via cloud. No commitment to installing them on my systems if i just want to quickly pick up and play. Again, if its a game that i am enjoying, i will buy it, but otherwise i like those 'rental' services that let you try before you buy. Or at least that is how I see they should be used.

I read somewhere that it was like 85% of PS5 game sold in Q4 2025 were digital, and it was like 90% were digital for Xbox. And the percentage seems to gradually grow yoy. 

Mainly due to sales information. Supposedly, 80% of full games purchased on PlayStation are digital, and the trend has been growing over the past several years.

I think we rarely ever get physical vs digital performance on games though. Capcom I know partially does, and they say that 90% of all their game purchases are digital. Somewhere around 85% if you exclude PC.

Well thats not really a good way to compare since theres WAY more games releasing digitally than physical. Its not even close. Also a 1 dollar digital game is the same as a 70 dollar physical in this case.