reaper527 t1_jdf0i40 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 10:35 PM

Reply to comment by RobertWayneLewisJr in How do you prefer to buy your games, digital or physical and why? by cluelesslygaming

> Physical. Feels like I actually own the game.

it's not just feels, it's reals.

people think they own their digital content until they don't. even outside of service shutdowns, people can find that they lost their entire account due to a ban (which isn't even necessarily from doing anything wrong)

like, in that paypal example those people probably got sorted out eventually, but who knows how long it took. there are also cases where accounts get hacked and there's plenty of reports of sony not being willing to reverse fraudulently made transactions on people's accounts in these cases, which leaves people with the choice of "eat the charges, or do a chargeback and get banned".

a physical disc will ALWAYS work. it can't be revoked, and it doesn't care if sony/ms/nintendo shut down their servers.

HungarianNewfy t1_jdfu6y8 wrote on March 24, 2023 at 2:08 AM

> a physical disc will ALWAYS work. it can't be revoked, and it doesn't care if sony/ms/nintendo shut down their servers.

Yes because thievery, property damage, neglect, or time ever occurs that would cause a physical edition to go missing, become ruined due to household catastrophes, misuse/unintentional damage or misplaced, and what the hell even is disc rot?

There is nothing wrong with preferring what you like. But to say it’s without flaws is just ignorant.

I grew up in the late NES to SNES era and had my share of games. What my parents did to them, I do not know. But I was able to amass some of my old collection (as well as others I never had) since then on many platforms from NES, SNES, N64 and Genesis. I still have my original hardware and games from my Playstation 1, 2, 3, PSP, GameCube, Wii, WiiU, Original Xbox, 360 and I still have PC discs going back as far as the original Warcraft and Diablo. But I’ve been mainly digital since the launch of the Xbox One/Playstation 4 and even longer on PC.

I’ve lost a few of my Will-always-work-and-can’t-be-revoked physical games (and some that have become worth a lot more than I ever thought they would) due to some water damage in my previous house. I most likely will never get those expensive ones back. There are games on the Gameboy that I wish I could have enjoyed, but alas, they’re selling for several hundreds of dollars. But with the closing of the 3DS/WiiU eshops, I found out that one of those 300+ gameboy carts can be purchased for the small sum of $4.99 CAD on the eshop. Well fuck me! I bought that in a heartbeat.

And as for more modern purchases, as I’ve said, I’ve been buying digital for well over 10 years, and as far as I know, I still have access to every one of those games that wasn’t limited by an online server (which wouldn’t change with a hard copy). Only, now everywhere I go, as long as I can find hardware that plays the games I’ve made purchases for, I have access to all of my games.

I’ve never been one for trading in my games, I think it’s a scam, but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve only ever sold a handful of my used games, and only because I had a duplicate hard copy or I bought it digitally. So that aspect has never been a consideration for me when I make my purchases.

Both forms of media have their advantages and their disadvantages. But to say one is better than the other, especially because it will “always” do this or have that…well that’s just foolish talk