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Physical or Digital? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I think the last console game I bought was Metroid Dread, but I leaned physical for those as well, because their digital storefronts are a single point of failure. I've witnessed first hand a friend of mine getting frustrated with a now-sunset Xbox 360 store, a problem I could see coming a mile away even when I was in high school when the console launched. On PC, if Steam disappeared tomorrow, I could pirate my entire library. If GOG gives me a week of lead time on their store going away, I could legitimately back up those games.

Digital is more convenient. I have shelves of old games and consoles that I'm working on culling rather than expanding, especially as someone who tends to move to a new apartment every couple of years. Physical often tends to be a false sense of security in the modern age of day 1 patches and other kinds of server dependency. DRM-free is actually what you want, unless you really, really enjoy the tangible aspect of the game. Outside of nostalgia, I don't think it matters to me.