I'm willing to take the very minor risk it will shut down while I still want to play those games in exchange for convenience, higher reliability against games being lost or broken, eshop exclusives, sometimes better sales, etc. We don't know how long the re-downloading ability of the Switch eshop will last, but the precedent is 10+ years after the successor comes out and if (please please) the next console is back-compatible with Switch that could be for a very long time indeed. So after 15 years or so, eshop is winning so far. From the Wii era, most but not all my physical games still work and the wii eshop still lets me redownload games I've bought. I don't really agree with one of the pros of physical and don't personally care either way about most of the others (I'm not a collector and I have to pay Nintendo for NSO anyways).Īs for keeping games forever I've one way or another lost all my pre-Wii games (lost, stolen, broken, damaged by water, etc). If digital games were more reliable and were guaranteed to stay available forever (or could be backed up in such a way) they would be the superior option by far. I find myself being less interested in going through the labor of switching carts to play games on Switch. There's also the fact that digital games should absolutely never cost as much as a brand new physical game since there's no manufacturing, store presence or stock to consider, and yet brand new digital games still retail at the same price, which makes it hard to support digital games that aren't indie.īut the convenience of digital can't be beat. Of course, digital has major issues, like games possibly being broken or gone forever when online stores close up shop, games are removed for one reason or another or servers shut down. Just means I'll never be much of a retro collector. As much as I want physical to never go away, digital is so much more convenient. Availability is a concern, and a physical cart or disc doesn't mean the game won't need an online connection for patches and what not. Today's market has made supporting physical much more difficult. And most important, in many cases nowadays, physical media is just a fancy digital purchase, it may be just a download code in a box, or you still need internet and servers to play the good or complete version of the game, get DLC, play online, or just play at all, many games require internet and servers working even if you buy physical.įor personal use, physical games still have a lot of advantages over digital games, but they aren't a godsend, and neither physical or digital media are good for videogame preservation, the only option is piracy.Arcades are a big example of physical media that doesn't work, they are expensive, they are rare, they are big and only rich people can have them at home, they are hard to fix, and many classic arcades were never ported into home versions, or had inferior ports.Older games can have physical copies around, but they may cost a fortune, maybe even more than a new current gen console, in recent years, videogame collecting became a very expensive hobby.It takes space, not everyone can have shelves full of games.Preserving the software means nothing without the hardware to run it, many classic consoles and computers are breaking down and can't be fixed, while modern consoles are much more fragile not all consoles can have those clones.Recent discs are not made to last, made with cheap plastic.Even if you take care of it, it does not last forever, cartridges and discs will someday stop working, even if never used, and floppies are ephemeral. For the people who claim that physical media is superior, nope, it's not perfect:
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