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The Controversial Battle of Physical Vs Digital Games

If you were a gamer back in the 2000s, there was only one way you could get your hands on a new game—buy a disk. That often meant rocking up to a physical store and grabbing one before they sell out. But, since then, things have changed a great deal. Today, most gamers buy and play their games via digital download—regardless of the platform they call home.

While the digital revolution has ushered in a new era of convenience, patches and updates, it’s not all good news. Some gamers still advocate physical purchases only—especially for consoles. And they might be onto something.

Let’s dive into this debate, looking at the common arguments for both formats.

Convenience is King

One of the biggest reasons that digital downloads became so popular is simply their convenience. If you have access to the internet and a digital store, then you can download any game on that store in a few minutes or hours. No trips to stores. No waiting for delivery. Simply click, download, play. It’s hard to argue with the convenience of this solution.

Not only that, but as digital storefronts often offer demos, reviews and even frequent sales, there is often little reason for gamers to want to look past these as a one-stop shop for getting new games.

Physical Ownership, Lending and Resale

Lots of gamers still opt for physical ownership where possible, to ensure that they will always be able to put the game disk or cartridge into the console and play the game. Not only that, but many gamers opt for this type of physical ownership for its lending and re-sale potential. As it is a universal feature that you cannot resell digital games once they are bound to an account.

Collector’s Items

Physical items also have the secondary function of being collectors’ items. This is especially true for limited edition versions of games. These collectors’ items can become decorative pieces but can also become quite valuable in the distant future, depending on the trajectory of that game.

The Storage Debate

In the same vein, physical discs and cartridges are much easier to preserve in libraries, galleries and archives. This means that physical media is almost essential for video game preservation. So, even if consumers don’t buy them, they are valuable for preserving the history of games.

On a consumer level, many gamers also struggle to keep their entire game library downloaded onto their machines—given that games often run into tens and hundreds of gigabytes.

DLC and Patch Culture

Despite the clear benefits of physical media, digital media has also created a bunch of benefits for both gamers and gaming companies. Most notably, requiring players to download their games from online stores allows for a more robust patch culture to exist. This means that bugs and issues which are discovered after released, can easily be patched out for the vast majority of players without them needing to find the patches themselves—they simply come up as updates when opening a game.

This is especially important for live service games like Genshin Impact or Fortnite; which require constant updates and patches. Speaking of which, buy primogems to get ahead in Genshin!

Of course, this has some negatives—with games often being released before they are 100% polished—but quick and easy patching is a huge benefit to ensure that players are playing the games like developers intend.

But Is Your Digital Library Really Yours?

However, for anyone who has taken a look at the terms and conditions of many of these online storefronts, you’ll notice that (in many cases) you’re buying access to a game, not a copy of the game itself. While this will change virtually nothing for almost all use cases, it does leave the game open to being taken down or made inaccessible meaning you might lose access to the game at some point in the future.

Environmental Impact

Physical games are often seen as producing a lot of waste. Waste discs, waste cases and all the emissions produced in shipping them around the world. While this waste is very real, and should be taken seriously, it’s not quite as simple as saying physical media produces waste and digital media does not. Digital media has huge environmental overheads in the form of unseen energy costs associated with the data storage, server availability and server maintenance which keep games downloadable 24/7, around the world. Thus, it’s fair to say that both methods produce their own style of environmental damage.

Hybrid Solutions: Convenience and Collection

Given the benefits on both sides of the argument, both physical and digital games are here to stay. Physical media appeals to players looking for a collectable, resellable, lendable and archive-ready format. While digital media appeals to those looking for immediate access. The best solution really depends on your use case.

Joel Gomez
Joel Gomezhttps://www.gadgetclock.com
Joel Gomez is an Avid Coder and technology enthusiast. To keep up with his passion he started Gadgetclock 3 years ago in 2018. Now It's his hobby at the night :) If you have any questions/queries and just wanna chit chat about technology, shoot a mail - Joel at gadgetclock com.

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