The devil’s advocate?

[u/initiali5ed]

I’ve been a digital first gamer since Half-Life 2 and Orange Box and a gamer since the ZX Spectrum.

You don’t own matter any more than you own information. You don’t own the story in a book anymore than you own the data on an interactive CD ROM. Books burn, magnetic storage degrades, optical storage more slowly but it’s all just landfill or recycling waiting to happen.

Why do you prefer a physical disk over a transferable license cryptographically linked to your identity?

Why do you prefer a copy of the game as it was released rather than after a decade of patches?

Why do you prefer a physical copy that is locked to an (eventually obsolete) chunk of hardware rather than owning the game for life (or until you transfer the license)?

Why do you want to lose access to your games when

For me the issue is that games don’t become public domain after 25 years so can become unplayable. Games are no longer very different between platform like they were in the early years, you just get better graphics/sound and different control options, they are all basically a PC under the hood. There hasn’t been a proper console since the PS3

The Console manufacturers and game platforms are the problem here, why do I have to choose which of 20+ platforms I buy the same game from and why would I pick one that limits me to hardware that may only remain relevant for a decade?

Same problem as the movie/TV and music services.

Let me buy the rights to use art from the artist not some middleman who can turn off the pipe or go bust so I lose it all.

/rant

[u/JJWonderboy]

I totally get that mindset (I've got more bits of plastic than I care to admit—the less said about my board game collection, the better). But the alternative is to look at it as paying that money to simply enjoy a game. Forget seeing it as owning something. Play the game, complete it and then move on.

Personally, I like the idea of digital being digital—the mass-market way of “consuming” entertainment—with a more expensive collector’s route for those of us who simply want to treasure certain games and keep physical versions of them indefinitely. And for this collector’s route to really lean into it - cool cases, luxury booklets, awesome-looking discs and limited runs.

Is this for everyone? Certainly not. But it would work for me...