Everything about digital-only is anti-consumer. Games will be more expensive with fewer and less important discount, the second-hand market will be dead, and so will be sharing games to friends so they can experience it for free.
Nintendo has implemented lending a digital game, but with arbitrary limits (you HAVE to be in physical proximity for the lending process, it lasts a maximum of two weeks, and you can lend 3 / borrow 1 game at a time). Sony and Microsoft don't let you do that.
This affects less people, but there are also many who like collecting them. Physical objects are nice, especially if you've been keeping all your old games for old consoles.
Which also ties into control of course: you can still play your games, even if the companies that made them and the console no longer exist, buy old games from retro shops, buy new games for old consoles from new indie devs, etc.
Unless that game ties to your account and disc becomes useless, or you game need a day 1 patch or day 412 patch or game is online or disc actually just a dummy that lets you download the game. Yes, the (in)convince of physical media totally worth it just so can sell what I got for $40/60/70 for $4 store credit at gamestop. All to have less control than I have from digital download from steam or GOG on PC.
But a lot of games are playable just fine without any patches, and there are plenty of physical releases, especially of indie games, which come out after the digital release and include all the patches. And putting aside the nice aspect of owning a physical object (often with cool things like a manual or map in the past and still true with many indie releases now) you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free, and even then you need to keep back up copies because the service you downloaded it from might disappear.
Disc consoles are superior in nearly every way:
- Disc consoles also have a hard drive, best of both worlds.
- You own the physical game. You don't own the digital version, just a license to it, which can be revoked, and deleted.
- You can trade games in 2 seconds.
- People can collect and play hundreds of games over the years on an moments notice, not waiting to download something. Games do try to compete to have the most of the players time, but it's not how all gamers play.
- Patches are normal for all games, and patches are usually smaller sizes than the entire game.
- Vintage is kind of popular now. None of those vintage systems, the original PS1/2/3/4 or Nintendos would be able to be experienced easily or at all if the physical media still didn't exist and survive. Digital platforms disappear when the system is EOL. Emulators can help, but it's a specialty and niche crowd. Handing a Nintendo to kids is something else.
When it comes to consoles - you do not.
- some games change with updates (try to play destiny 2 red war story line with your physical disc that you can still buy for some reason despite game being free)
- Nintendo can block specific cartridges (only thing that step Xbox and PS from doing that now is that it's not implemented on their end)
- some games have separate online pass and/or DLC codes that can only activated once
- on PC CDs used to come with a cd-key you had to activate (still do?)
- See Xbox One 2013 DRM plan
Only way to "own" a game is to have a pirated version of a game regardless of a platform.
Tell me how does physical disc protect ownership? Then compare it to my digital downloads in steam where I can just copy game files between computers (if it's DRM-free)
> Also just look at the parallel issue that happened exactly these days with Sony deleting purchased movies from libraries. The same will happen with games.
I don't think Sony is much to blame here. They lost rights to distribute that content, so they can't distribute it. Blame copyright laws, not Sony.
As for Destiny not working,this is a related but different problem, stopkillinggames tries to tackle it, but both issues go hand in hand.
1. If we give up physical copies,we lose ownership,as simple as that
2. Server side components must be released by the publisher once they take offline a game, as long as that game was "sold" to the customer
So ownership is a very important component in this, don't make it sound absurd.
> How were they allowed to "sell" those titles in the first place then? Because it was never implied that access might be lost or restricted,it was very much sold to customers,not rented.
It was in EULA and ToS.