You're all looking at digital downloads wrong!

Most companies will offer a disc/cartridge exchange policy.
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/nintendogamecube/discreplace.jsp
https://help.ea.com/en/article/electronic-arts-warranty-policy
http://support.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox-360/disc-drive/disc-replacement-program

 

Except it's not invincible. What if say on your 3DS you download every game. Okay, now 20 years down the road, your 3DS breaks, OOPS! There goes ALL of your games. And chances are the company you bought them from, won't replace them 20 years later either.

Physical copies will always win. You can make so much more money reselling it.

Also I've never had any of my games break without me trying to break them (IE Resident Evil 6). I also haven't had any of my games scratch beyond playability.

 

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.

 

All 3DS games are stored on an SD card. I know that it's an example, but you can do MUCH better.

 

Can, but refuse to.

 

If it was a Google Play like system where you can share one account across everything without any hassles and easily transfer stuff to new devices while being more reasonably priced, I'd be for it. But right now there's no incentive to not get physical copies.

 

You obviously haven't seen the PSN store where new releases sell for £10 or £20 more than physical copies.

 

Anyone who likes to play classic games will always vote agains digital only versions. For most, the ability to keep a copy forever just incase you want to play it years later, show it to their kids etc. I have plenty of very old games that I am able to play whenever I like, not just when the download provider says I can. Many things can prevent downloads content from working, such as servers going down (which the users have no say in what so ever), the console breaking, as in the case of Nintendo, where the games are locked to the device, rather than the user. But if you have a CD or Cart, then you can play the game on a different machine, even when that machine doesn't have any sort of server access.
Personally, I'm agains it.

 

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.

 

I am not for digital download because I am collector and a gamer. I enjoy collecting physical copies of my games as much as I enjoy playing them.

 

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.

 

I'm speaking with my wallet. More of you guys should do the same. I put it like this:
In a box, on a shelf, in a store, or I'm not buying the games anymore.

Sure, some games are logged in through Steam or Origin, but they were still games I bought in a box, on a shelf, in a store. I have never bought "just a download" and don't plan to start.

 

They can keep their "digital downloads".
I prefer my downloaded games to be analog.

Kids these days with all of their fancy solid state and hard drives.
Back in my day, downloading games meant waiting on the mailman
to deliver our punch cards. If we were lucky, we could game for a
whole day before having to go to radio shack to replace our vacuum tubes.
Then, we walked to and from school up hill both ways while barefoot.

 

The flash RAM they use on SD cards deteriorates over time. It's not an infallible technology, hell, no storage medium is exempt from inevitable deterioration.

Argument scenario one: "Digital downloads are better than physical copies because they're more convenient"

True, they do have advantages over physical copies, but it's not without potential issues, servers shutting down, companies going under, etc. You could be out several hundred dollars' worth in games. Unless you could somehow download it once more, you'll have to repurchase said games. You should only have to pay for a game once and keep it and not have to buy it again. The companies got the money from said game once already, why should you have to pay for that same game twice?

Argument scenario two: "But you can always transfer them to another hard drive, online storage site or SD card."

Also a good point to bring up, but again, magnetic or flash-based storage devices are doomed to fail after so many years of use; It's impossible to keep said digital downloads stored forever unless infallible storage mediums are invented. There's no substitute for physical copies, and the other major flaw are internet connections.

Only a small percentage of people (at least in the US) have super-fast internet due to inconsistencies in the entire infrastructure. Those who paid for digital games will often download several gigabytes worth of data on a connection <128 kbps, which will take quite a while, and a lot of the time, those games have to be verified over the internet. For those who don't have gigabit connections, damned if you do, damned if you don't.