Physical Games Will Never Die for Me

So I watched ReviewTechUSA's video on "physical media is dying" and this is the comment I left.



I still buy physical and I will as long as I can, because I love seeing the game on my wall. I don't care "how easy to use" and "installs" and all that, I like looking over at my DVD rack and seeing my Wii U, PS3, and XBOX 360 games along my wall. I love looking at my (3)DS game cases lined up on my (3)DS game shelf. I love flipping through my 3DS game case to get to my game. I play mostly single player games so 15 years from now my games will still be mostly functional.

Now for my "burned" story with digital, a story I plan on turning into skit video. I have a bunch of demos on my PS3 and 360 that I downloaded when I didn't really have money back in high school. When I finally got a job to buy games, I tried getting the full games from PSN and XBL. Oh, those games are no longer on the servers, and this was before PS4 and XBOX ONE. Then around the same time, I wanted to buy some launch DS games that I didn't have (Feel the Magic and Sprung to be specific). What did I do? I went on amazon and bought used copies. Now lets look at a more recent example. PT? Yeah, that digital Konami game that was only available for like 9 months and now it's impossible to get if you don't already have it. Now if only it was released physically. Even if there's game breaking bugs and the patches are no longer available, well it's still playable up to a point.

I will ALWAYS prefer physical.

Why Physical Games are Hear to Stay (for the forseeable future)

"Physical media is dying, eventually everything will be digital; it happened with music, it's happening with movies, and it'll happen to games."

As a game collector, how many times have you heard that? Happy Gamer here and I hear that all the time. Personally, I think physical games are here to stay, and the arguments for movies and music are apples and oranges when compared to games.

Before I start with why physical is here to stay, let me explain why it's important to me. I am a collector. I have SHELVES of games from pretty much every generation. I have 2nd gen, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and some 8th. I display my collection proudly. Given the choice between physical and digital, I will almost always chose physical because a full hard drive is nothing to look at, but a wall full of games is. I love physical.

OK, so why is physical media for games here to stay when music went digital years ago and I guess movies are currently too? I mean physical collectors will always be there but the vast majority of people just want the best experience for their dollar. And that's the reason right there, people want the best experience for their dollar. In general, you get more value from owning a physical disc than downloading a file, at least with gaming.

Here's the deal; before the digital revolution in music distribution, you had to buy an entire $20 15 track album if you wanted 1 song. It didn't matter if you wanted all 15 tracks or even cared about them, you had to pay $20. You might get lucky and they would release a single, but it would still set you back $3, and it would probably come with a remixed version or some "side b" you didn't care about. With the digital revolution of music distribution, you could buy individual songs for $1. It didn't matter if it was released as a single or an entire album, you could get that 1 song on it's own and not have to worry about unwanted songs. That is why digital distribution became the de facto way to buy music.

So what about games. Right now (and probably forever), you have to buy the full game regardless of physical or digital. You can't say "I only want this level, so I will only buy this level" when buying games, you have to buy "the full album." Additionally, it's the same price physical or digital. I know steam and GOG have sales where the games are significantly cheaper digital than with physical, but any game on PSN, XBLA, or eShop are all the same price. In fact, I frequently see games CHEAPER physical than digital in terms of consoles. At the time of writing this, I'm in the market for Smash 4 on Wii U. If I buy the game physically through BestBuy.com, it will cost me $50. If I buy the game digitally, it will cost me $60. That's not the only example. I see games on sale all the time physically but their digital counterpart is still full retail price all the time. It's typically around $5, but the fact that the version with all the production, transportation, and overhead cost is the same price or LESS THAN the version that is just a copy-paste of digital bits from a server is the primary reason that physical games are here to stay.

OK, lets say that the reverse is true. It rarely is, but lets say that the digital version is a couple bucks cheaper. I mean, when you buy a digital album it's typically a little cheaper than a physical album. Well...there's the second hand and sharing market. As I said, I am a collector. Even if I'm done with a game, I will not sell it, but many people do sell their games when they're done. I also hang out with my friends IRL and we play videogames and I bring the disc with me or they bring it with them, and so do many other people. It's currently impossible to sell stand alone digital games second hand without selling the entire console (the only time I know of that happening is with Silent Hill PT where people sold their PS4's with PT on it for like $1000). Similarly, it's very impractical to bring digital games with you to a friend's house, having to either bring your console with you or signing in and downloading it to their console. It was a little easy with the 360's removable hard drive, but that isn't true for the ps3, ps4, XBOXONE, Wii, or Wii U. However, with physical media you can sell your games once you're done and it's really easy to bring them with you to a friend's house or let your friend borrow it. With music you generally didn't sell your vinyl, cassettes, or CDs, so the second hand market wasn't really a thing. As for bringing it with you, it became much easier to transport digital because 1000 songs could be loaded onto and played off of a pocket MP3 player whereas 1000 songs on CD or cassette would take up like like 4 shoe boxes, even more if you're talking vinyl. With sharing, well legality comes into question, but lets just say it's very easy to "share" digital songs, and it's much more difficult to "share" digital games that way.

One aspect that can be cited with handhelds are portability, and that might be why digital is a little more attractive on 3DS and Vita, but not by much. Yeah, I remember the GameBoy days and having the carrying case with all my cartridges in it, and I still kind of do that with my 3DS on occasions, but most of the time I have the game I'm working on at the moment and I leave the rest at home. I don't really need to have all my games at my finger tips because I'm just playing short bursts. Most people I talk to are the same way; they have the 1 game in their game slot and that's all they're interested in playing at the moment. They might have some download only titles like Pokemon Shuffle, but most of the time it's physical. (This argument falls flat with consoles because they aren't supposed to be portable. If you're in your living room, chances are you have the space for physical games and space is not a concern).

Another possible argument is "it's more convenient to download a game than drive to the store to buy it." OK, lets be honest here. Unless you have google fiber, it's going to take an hour or more to download a full 20 gig game. It's going to take you less time to drive to the store, buy it, and drive back home. I live about 10 minutes from a gamestop. Round trip it'll take me about half an hour to get a game. Compare that to 1 and a half hours to download a game, and it's more convenient to get physical. I know that not everyone lives so close to a gamestore, but chances are the further you live from somewhere that sells videogames, the slower your internet speed is, so it typically will be more convenient to buy physical than digital (plus you get all the other benefits of physical listed above sooooo......)

So there you have it, physical media is here to stay with videogames. Maybe if all game manufacturers adopted the Steam and GOG mentality of "there's no overhead cost to digital, so lets pass that savings onto the consumer and sell even more games," digital would take off. I'm not saying digital is bad; it really opened the door to indi developers. However, I just don't see it going away any time soon, or in the near future. Will games go 100% digital, maybe 1 day, but I sure can't see it. Well this has been Happy Gamer, signing off, and physical ain't going anywhere.

PS: because it's always cited as an example of digital taking over, I want to address the whole "movies are going digital as well" argument. Personally I don't see that at all. People are still buying Blu-Ray movies, and I don't know anyone who actively chooses to buy movies digitally. This is mainly because digital movies are distributed through heavy DRM. Amazon Instant Video, Vudu, UltraViolet, flixter, etc. all "you must have this distribution app and it's locked to your account and out can only stream it or whatever." However, with a Blu-Ray or DVD you just put the disc in your player, whatever player it is, and play it. Maybe they're referring to rental. That's true, digital has replaced physical with rental since it's more convenient to say "Netflix I want to watch this with my $8/month subscription" than to drive to the video store, pay $1 for a movie, drive home, watch it, drive back, return it, and drive home. Sometimes I might find someone who has a season pass on iTunes for a TV series where they get the TV show a day after it airs, but that's more the exception than the norm. I'd say physical is still very relevant in terms of movies as well as games.

I Doubt Most People Prefer Buying Games Digitally

Statistics can lie, and I believe I found another example of that.

Hey everyone, Happy Gamer here. I read an article recently about Nintendo possibly releasing the NX without a disc drive as shown by some preliminary patents. You can read it here. First off, I hate the idea of a console without physical media since I love having my games on my shelf. Second, I think it just wasn't put in the preliminary patent because every console has like 20 patents alone (but it is fun to hear people speculate about how Nintendo is going back to cartridges or going the way of SD cards).

But here's the big kicker. The article says "most gamers now prefer to buy the game digitally." That I find hard to believe. From my experience, most console gamers still prefer physical. People are still buying physical games. I know I still prefer physical. Pretty much all my friends prefer physical. I still see loads of physical games being sold at retailers. I still always see people at gamestop and in the game section of stores. Physical is still very alive and relevant.

However, I believe that the statistic "a majority of games are bought digitally" is TECHNICALLY correct, and here's why. There are 3 types of games that are predominantly bought digitally, steam sale games (and PC games in general), indie games, and PSN free/discount games.

Steam has all but eliminated physical games on PC. They made it very convenient to just download the games, and made physical PC games very INconvenient. Then you have steam sales where people buy loads of games for ultra cheap, but only available digitally. If someone want's super cheap steam games, they need to buy digitally. If they want a PC game in general, they typically need to buy digitally.

Then you have indie games. Indie games are really taking off. For those of you who don't know, an indie game is a game developed by a small development team or individual, or otherwise not made by a big studio. They typically don't have the resources to release the game physically, so to get it on PC, PS3, PS4, XBOX360, XBOX ONE, and Wii U, they are released digitally. Aside from the indiebox subscription box, I don't really know of indie games being sold physically, so the only way to enjoy them is digitally.

Lastly, you have the free and discounted games available through PS+. This is probably accounting for the digital console games. With PS+, you get steam sale level discounts and even more games for free. While some of these games are released physically, the only way to get them for free or heavily discounted is to get them digitally.

So lets say that 60% of games are bought digitally now. Well, I'm going to estimate that half of those digital sales are PC games where digital is easier and almost always cheaper than physical. Then I'm going to estimate that 20% of those digital sales are for indie games that are not available physically. I'm also going to estimate that another 20% of the digital games are PSN deals that you can only get from digital. The remaining 10% are games that have a physical release and the digital price is the same as physical and people just preferred to buy them digitally. If my made up numbers are correct, that means that of all the games sold, only 6% are people just preferring digital over physical with all other aspects being equal, whereas 40% of people are buying physical over digital all other things equal. I don't have anything but trends of what I see in people saying their preferences are, but I'm guessing that these are rather accurate, otherwise people wouldn't have cared about XBOX ONE DRM.

Well, this has been Happy Gamer, signing off, and you need to think about where the statistics are coming from.

Hapy Gamer Rambles, a look at XBOX ONE's used game DRM

OK, so welcome to part 2 of the XBOX ONE original design look. Last time I talked about the always online aspect. Today I'll talk about the used game DRM. Next time, I'll talk about the kinect. Now with the used game DRM, I believe Microsoft was trying to accomplish 2 things, control over the market and no more used games, and make the XBOX ONE an all digital machine.

Now like always online, you can't sell me on only digital and no used games. I'm a collector, I like my physical copies for display reasons. I also hate digital only since I've missed some digital only releases and now I can't get them anywhere. There have been launch titles that are no longer produced, and if not for used physical copies, I would be out of luck. Not only that, with physical I don't have to worry about my console running out of space. I'm only limited to how much shelf space I have. Also, as a collector, I refuse to sell games. Even if the game is utter crap, it is now part of my collection and I will not sell it. Again, I'm not the norm, but this time there are more people who would agree with me. There are a lot of people that like physical copies.

So, where did Microsoft go wrong? Well here's how they treated physical copies. "If you buy the game physically, the game is then installed onto your hard drive and is locked to your account. With this, you don't need to have the disc in the tray and you've got family share. You can't sell it unless at a specified retailer. You can only loan the game to 1 friend, and now the game is tied to their account forever. Basically, you can't simply sell or loan your games." So what's the problem here? Well Microsoft basically missed the entire point why people buy physical copies. You don't buy a physical copy to have it treated exactly like a digital copy. If you buy a physical copy, you buy it so you could easily trade with with friends, easily sell it, and play the game off the disc. If you wanted disc-less play, no way to sell your game, and no way to trade your game, you buy it digitally. Whether you wanted to control used game sales or wanted to go all digital, this was not the way to do it.

So, controlling used game sales. I can see where they come from, developers don't get money from used sales, they need to keep the servers running, and they might not have gone under if more people bought it new. Here's one thing though that I think developers forget; used games are far different than pirated games. With pirated games, one once legal license can be used entertain an infinite amount of people. With a used game however, only one person can enjoy it, and the original owner forfeits all rights to enjoying it later. With used games, people do experience seller's remorse, because now they can't enjoy that game ever again unless they buy another copy. I will save the details on my explanation of why people sell their games and how to avoid that for a later date, but here's the gist; people sell their games because they're board with them and don't want them anymore and would rather have some money. If you don't want people to sell their game, make a game they won't want to sell. Xenoblade Chronicle was going for $70 used, because that's the price it took to get people away from it. Bear in mind, new it cost $40. It was so good, people considered it worth more than the new price. If those developers released more copies at $40, they would have sold so many more. In fact, GameStop got into some trouble because they got some new copies and they opened them and called them used because it would make more money due to used costing $30 more. If you don't want people to sell your game, make a game they won't want to sell.

So I addressed preventing used games, what about going all digital. Well that's a very simple answer that developers don't seem to grasp; pass the savings in shipping and production onto the customer. When a game is physical, there's far more costs than just digital; shipping, packaging, printing, disc writing, the middle mans cut, and things like that. All in all, the developer and Microsoft might only get like $45 together after all the other costs of doing physical. So without all these added costs, how much do digital games cost? Exactly the same as if you bought it physically. Sure, developers now make more per game and financially it's the same for the consumer, but then that means that the consumer has to deal with all the draw backs to digital, aka, no flexibility on sharing or selling and hard drive space. Sure they get the perks of disc-less play, but that doesn't necessarily make up for the drawbacks. If you want people to buy digitally, make it financially advantageous. "OK physical copy costs $60, if you're going to buy digitally, we'll subtract the cost of printing the disc, making the packaging, shipping the game to the retailer, the retailer's cut, let's round that down to the nearest dollar, so now your final price is $45." That's 25% off physical. Do you know why Steam can do all those sales? It's because it's an all digital platform without any middle men or production costs, and they pass the savings onto the consumer. They did do some physical releases, but they made it better financially to buy it digitally. You make digital cheaper than physical, people will then buy digital, and you can naturally phase out physical. I fear the day when that happens, but that's how you do it.

So, when Microsoft got rid of the DRM, they got rid of the "features" like disc-less play and family share. I already addressed disc-less play and if people want that feature they'll just buy it digitally, but what about family share? Well, we really don't know what we lost with that one. The details were kind of hazy as to what that would actually do. There was something about being able to share your entire game collection with 10 people in your family, and those 10 people could use the same license. An example they gave was a dad and his 2 college sons playing CoD together off the same license with the dad at home and the sons off at their respective colleges. The way it sounds is that you could have shared your entire game collection with 10 "family members," aka friends. How would this have worked, we don't know. Would there have been 10 permanent people you call family that could use it? Would that mean you could be logged onto 10 different consoles? Would it have meant that you could call 10 consoles your "console" and everyone on that console had access to your games? No one really knows. Microsoft did try to advertize the DRM as a good thing, and to that I must give them some credit, but it ultimately failed because people still hated it and DRM is almost never the way to go. People expect a certain level of DRM with digital games. If you want to get rid of physical games, you need to make digital more appealing than physical, not destroy the whole reason people buy physical in the first place.

OK, that's enough for today. Next time, the kinect. Well this has been happy gamer, and if you want to get rid of physical copies and used games, DRM is not the way to go.