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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

This person is out of touch. Most consumers do not want to pay more for games, increase the difficulty of buying it, having to spend extra time searching for the game, or having to put it into a console.

Digital has made the user experience better and provides more revenue to developers and platform holders. It's a win win for everyone involved.

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I disagree with many of the author's points. But I'm still in camp physical.

Really, the draw of physical media for me is in tangible ownership—that is, ownership that doesn't require a separate entity to confirm after sale.

Having tangible ownership over something gives you the freedom to do with it what you wish. That means ripping CDs, copying programs, lending copies, etc. It's enabling second-order actions without (greatly) hindering primary actions.

Digital makes the experience better while things are supported. But you must buy all the games you want before they're delisted or the shop closes.

The vast majority of physical releases are available on secondary markets at reasonable cost. There are a small number of games that are very expensive because of supply and demand, though... but that's better than not having any option other than a time machine to get games like NFL Blitz and Daytona USA for xbox 360.

You don't "buy" games, you license them. Digital distribution via DRM'd platforms makes it that much easier to enforce license terms against you. It's only "win win" if you see no problem with living in a corporate dystopia where you own nothing.

Physical disks have DRM too.

They have less DRM. You can sell physical media but you can't sell the license associated with your corporation account. They can't break into your home and take your physical media away from you but they can remotely revoke your access to digital media by changing database records.

I know a family with multiple Nintendo Switch handhelds who now only buy physical game copies, because that’s the only way the game won’t be locked to one console.

(Myself, I’m a “GOG games on the Steam Deck” kind of guy.)

I stopped buying physical games when I got a PS4. It's so much quicker to just download games and I can store them all on my external hard drive. It's not like I would ever try selling my used games to GameStop for a couple dollars anyway.

Will you want to play those PS4 games in 10-20 years? To give an example of how this goes, Xbox Live, which launched in Nov 2002, stopped supporting the original Xbox in April 2010. If you had digital purchases and didn't already download them to your Xbox, they're gone forever.

While the lifespan of online services is typically a bit longer now, chances are that game consoles and game discs will long outlive their respective online services. Xbox 360's store is shutting down July 2024[0], making purchases on that console impossible (though downloads of existing purchases will keep working, for however long). The 360 was released Nov 2005, so it's had a much longer online-service lifespan of 18 years, but it's easy to guess that it probably won't hit, say 30. Probably not even 25, I'd wager.

Just to put the PlayStation 4 in perspective, that system was released in Nov 2013. Already 10 years old. I'd like to think it will easily have another 10 years of being able to purchase and download titles online for it, but who knows?

I mean, fortunately I never have to care about this issue - I always purchase the physical version of any console game for this exact reason. I'll deal with a little inconvenience if it means I get to keep my games for decades.

[0] https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2023/08/17/xbox-360-store-will-c...

I have them all on an external hard drive. If I back up my stuff I should be ok.

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