Title says it all lads.
Do you prefer your games bought digitally on a storefront I.e. Steam, PSN etc OR on a disc in your shelf?
Personally on PC I always get games from GOG and Steam because obviously most titles are digital and it is convenient for me. (Despite owning TF2 on disc since 2007! Yep!)
When it’s consoles though, I always wanna get it on disc and I am glad I go the extra mile for it especially when new games like SF6 are on preowned sales. Look at the PSN fiasco with shows, this is why I prefer physical media on consoles because you can keep it.
PC = Convenience, laziness and most are digital only anyway
Console = Don’t want scummy corpos taking stuff I bought away from me, disc it is.
Your thoughts lads?
Disks are for games I want to be able to pull out of a box 10 years from now and go “oh man I remember this”. I have the box from a DSi that I filled with GBA games, and a shelf for Switch and PS4 games that, when they’re retired for something else, it’d be nice to come back to once in a while. My daughter has gotten into my GBA games lately, so that’s been nice.
PC games, they’re so much more available. Steam is steady, GOG is steady, I feel I can leave it to them to keep and I’ll have any particularly treasured games 10 years from now, anyway.
I recently redownloaded Driver Parallel Lines some 14 years after I bought it. PC is doing so much better than consoles on keeping things backwards compatible - imagine a PS5 casually letting you play PS2 or PS3 era games at no extra cost!
I’m pretty much all digital. I know the arguments for “you don’t really own those digital copies of media,” but it still feels like it’s mine because I can still go and play any of those games whenever I want. I’d just need to reinstall it with an Internet connection.
My PC doesn’t even have a disk drive so I can’t play physical unless I get an external drive, and I don’t really care enough to do that.
PC? All digital.
Consoles? All physical
I do t play games on console all that often so I’d rather the option to pick up a cheap used copy. Plus I could play that game any number of years down the road when the servers are long shut down. But on PC I just want to click the button and the game installs and opens.
This is the way.
Does a disc even matter these days? There’s still a 100gb patch and likely internet connection required?
Yes. You can resell discs.
I didn’t have much physical space in my last apartment, so I got used to buying as much media digitally as I could. I got used to it, and now prefer it. And now that I’ve shifted from console gaming to PC gaming, I’m pretty much all in on digital.
For console games I always buy physical but for PC I buy digital. I have a ton of Ps1 - 5 games that I have physical copies of and they get played alot . My son is also getting into gaming and he likes to look through the games on my shelf to find fun things to play.
Digital only, cheapest price that isn’t Epic.
I prefer not to devote myself to any one storefront, and while Valve is very altruistic I think healthy competition is one of the things that keeps PC gaming storefronts at their best.
Even on consoles, I prefer to go digital; saves bookcase space.
I ended up playing my physical copies way less than digital ones because I can’t be arsed to juggle disks and cartridges.
I sold most of my physical collection when upgrading from PS4 to XSX and bought those games digital there since Microsoft has proven to be solid when it comes to backwards compatibility.
All of my portable consoles (Switch, Vita, DSi, N3DS, Analogue Pocket) are jailbroken and digital only because memory is so cheap that I can hold all noteworthy games on a single SD card. In time current systems will end up in a similar state so there’s little point getting attached to dust collecting boxes.
I prefer roms and emulators above all else as I know that as long as I back them up I’ll be able to play them. Other than that I use steam for convenience as a linux only gamer but I’m all for gog and their DRM free stance.
As for physical. The hardware fails unless its a ps2 😄. So at the end you are left with a ton of discs and you Will have to rip them to play them. Also some games are just shipping unfinished on disc and need to download patches or whatever.
Do they even make physical PC games anymore? Last ones I bought were either discs that immediately downloaded an updated copy of the whole game, or the box just contained a download code.
For the switch I buy physical, but it may be the last console where that makes sense.
Yep, my thoughts exactly. The last “physical” PC game I bought was Mass Effect Andromeda, and it was just a box with a code. I still buy physical Switch games, though, but partially because I get them with Amazon reward points, which sadly aren’t usable on digital items.
On PC I’ll buy digital because worst case if it comes unavailable I’ll torrent a copy.
For consoles I am staunchly in the physical camp because it is more likely I’ll be able to play those games in 10 years when the maker has shut down their store.
I’ve been pretty much all-digital since… Steam came out. Outside of Switch games (I dont trust Nintendo with how they handle their NNID system. it’s just janky), it doesn’t really make sense for me to buy physical copies. The obvious benefit there is resale, but I can rarely afford new games, so by the time I either get them, or finish playing them, they’ve already dropped in value entirely
I often buy physical for games I know I’ll like, for the rest, mostly digital.
When I end up liking a specific digitally bought game a lot, I try to buy a physical copy as an “archive” copy, in the case the store shuts down. An example would be Hades, which I bought digital, and ended up buying a switch physical copy from Limited Run Games.
Here’s my perspective as a PC player. Even back in the early 2000s, discs were mostly just a form of DRM. When you install the game from a disc, 99% of the time, the installer copies the contents of the disk to your hard drive, then the disk just acts as a key in order to “unlock” your installed copy. No-cd patches just make the game think the disc is inserted when it’s not.
Today, the only difference is the delivery method, and it’s where things can get a little hazy. Steam is where I own most of my games, and I do like Steam and Valve, and consider them pretty trustworthy in terms of large tech companies. But, even so, because the only way I’m really able to get games from Steam is through their servers, there are situations that are out of my control where a game that was once available to me, no longer is.
This is why I’m starting to prefer GOG. They have a zero DRM policy, and offer offline installers for most of their games. Meaning, if I purchase a game, I download that installer, load it onto a thumb drive, and I effectively have that game forever, no matter what happens to GOG, the developer, the publisher, etc. I have a couple of games that have been lost to time officially, that I can install as easy as the day they came out because I have that offline installer. It’s as good as having any CD game.
So, bottom line is, CD, no CD, I really don’t care. Give me the installer, and guarantee I don’t be locked out of my game because of something I can’t control, and I’m happy.
PC: Digital if on a trusted platform like Steam or the game is free. Otherwise I’m just not buying the game.
Console: Physical, as I can resell the games I purchased.
