I was all against digital downloads for the longest time for all the same reasons most people hate the idea but I recently just started to understand why it will become a huge asset to us all.

You see, when you buy a game physical, there are two major perks, one is you can sell it again and get 15 bucks back(average), and you actually own something physical.

On average, a used game buyer or new game trade in'er saves 15 dollars in one way or another.

Now what if, just what if say..Nintendo started releasing all their first party games for 40 bucks even with no tax online? Yeah you lose your ability to sell it but, you are practically already selling it setting as you've saved that money already, and on top of that you KEEP the game.

Your game is on a hard drive now. Not in your hands, that is true..but! At least(with Nintendo) they ate not on a companies servers where they can just take it away from you at any time.

What's more is,no disk breaks or scratches!
So my concluding point is, buying online might end up saving us just as much money, we get an invincible copy of the game and the companies spend less money on production which lowers delays and issues with demand.

I still suggest the companies release hard copies for people who just can't download big games, or do what Sony tried to do with the vita and sell memory cards for the people who can't download, but they would cost more.

Does it not sound good? I'm not implying we go pure digital, there if way to many issues with that, but there should be perks to supporting a company by digital download (aka 20 dollars off).

 

That's good to know, I've never actually damaged a disk so I always figured I'd be shit out of luck if I did. Well that's one issues out.

 

Also the biggest flaw in this is that the pricing just doenst happen. If you take games off the shelves and go digital only, your at the mercy of what Sony / Microsoft want you to pay. If digital downloads on consoles were indeed say 20-30% cheaper on release date then I wouldnt have a problem and your point would be more valid. But more often than not, digital downloads (especially where M$ are concerned) are a damn sight more expensive online. New released on Xbox Demand can be £49.99, way more expensive than they ever have been off the shelf, and this is usually a good few months after physical release date. On Sonys side it can be even worse. They release some games online at a whopping £54.99 in the UK.

I fully expect digital to be the only way for distribution in the coming years, but to think its a better model for the consumer, especially with the pricing structures they have now is absurd.

 

My point was if they do (and if they want it to be successful they will) go with cheaper online downloads, then a lot more people would be more than willing to go for it. I believe Nintendo is going in the right direction by allowing the option of digital downloads but are only rewarding people with double Nintendo points at the moment.

As far as the "what happens in 20 years? " comment. I do understand the value of old games, I have a unopened copy of pokemon blue that's graded and worth 500 bucks, yet If I wanted to I could go play pokemon blue on the flash player on my phone or an emulator on my phone. Point is you will have access to your game and legal rights to play it.

True question is if technology will exist in 20 years at this rate of decline :/

 

Can, but refuse to.

 

There probably will come a time when the games companies can give or take the support of high street chains, at which point they will be free to undercut the retail prices without fear of them freezing out shelf space. When this time comes there probably will initially be a fairly decent saving for buying online vs retail. Over time, however, as buying online becomes the accepted way of purchasing games, and the high street stores fade out, the prices will creep back up again.

 

To use Australia as an example;
Nintendo charges $70 for new 3DS games... Physical wise, you can buy newly released games for about $60 or even as low as $50, and again, that's for new releases (you could also import, in which, you can get just about any pal 3DS game for $50 or less, new or otherwise)... Hard to justify buying digital at an optimal $25 difference :/ Additionally, there's the whole loss of collector's value, increased risk in losing those digital games should something happen to the 3DS and so forth.
Essentially, Nintendo is a quintessential example of how not to do digital, at least in terms of 3DS.

Sony, on the other hand, seems to be more competent in terms of pricing. New vita games tend to (with exceptions) cost loss for digital, rather than their physical counterparts in Australia. That, and the whole account system is certainly a boon. However, the cost of vita memory cards are somewhat of a detriment to those prices in that, one can justify the difference between physical and digital to be on par as result of purchasing one.

Subsequently: Whereas I have purchased vita games digitally, I have little desire in purchasing 3DS games digitally, as there simply is no compelling reason for me to go digital. (At least, not yet)

Conclusively; The way digital is being handled by the big 3 at present, it is not all too compelling in switching to digital. There may be the odd game that makes it worthwhile, and it's certainly a good fallback in case a game is unavailable physically, however, considering that costs for digital are generally greater (particularly when you consider the long term), and in case of nintendo, FAR great (at least, in Australia), it is unlikely that digital will replace physical copies anytime soon, as there is low incentive.

But forsooth, should it be cheaper than physical, it's likely that digital could become as prominent as steam, or to some extent, shift trends in favor of it.

On a completely unrelated note: To put digital in another perspective, it's at least allowed for PAL to get some games it's likely we would (Debatably) otherwise never get; such as Ragnarok Odyssey (vita) and Code of Princess (3DS). Ironically, both are somewhat competitively priced here at $40 and $50 respectively.

 

You still don't have the disc, plus used games go well below $15 at times, but even so, if I wasn't going to buy the game at launch, if I planned to buy it used for $15, I saved nothing, I lost.

Good luck getting that game back when a service is discontinued and you experience HDD failure (which is more common than you think).

Yep - just the neverending fear of file corruption... since hard drives do that sometimes when they're old.

False on all three accounts.

Yeah, we're not moving away from physical copies anytime soon - games are getting bigger and bigger in size, so good luck downloading 26 gigs worth of data each time you want to play a game instead of "Popping it in and bam! Done!".

If digital games were $20 off, sure... but they're not.

I went half-digital with the PS3 and the PSVita already, but that's mostly due to PSN exclusives, Gamesharing and PS+ games- if not for those, I'd still buy physical copies en masse wheras now I buy them when I know I'll be their only user or if the price is just right.