Movies, music and, to a lesser extent, books are all moving towards a fully digital future. It’s time for the game industry to take that step too because all the benefits of tangible versions have slowly disappeared. That’s why I say goodbye to plastic cases and discs and embrace the benefits of a fully digital library! In addition, poker, Blackjack and Roulette are now played virtually at non GamStop casinos on Gamblingpro.pro, so why don’t other games go virtual and get rid of all physical keys?
It turned out that the ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’ disc for the PlayStation 5 only contains 72.23 MB of data. This means that the disk only functions as a key for the game’s licence – to start the game you have to download another hundred gigabytes. The fairy tale that tangible media ensures that games remain playable after the servers go offline is more or less over.
Let that be the main reason for people to buy real games. People want to own a game, even if the platform’s servers go offline, but that is often no longer the case with a tangible version these days.
Patches
‘Modern Warfare 2’ is of course an extreme example in that area, but with other games it is no longer as simple as pushing your disc into your console and playing. Day one patches are the order of the day; therefore, games are not immediately playable without a download. Even at Nintendo, those days are numbered. Some games, such as the ‘Ori Collection’, still come completely on the cartridge, but that is the exception rather than the rule these days. A patch almost always has to be downloaded, so we can carefully eliminate the plug-and-play advantage.
The games that are playable via the disc without download are often not completely finished. Games are labelled ‘gold’ well in time these days – meaning they are ready for print – but development is certainly not yet complete. For example, would you like to play the first version of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’? Or the first version of ‘Horizon Forbidden West’ with flickering vegetation in performance mode? Games these days are rarely completely finished when they are pressed onto discs.
Don’t Worry About Your Games!
In addition, it is already a crazy idea that servers suddenly go offline and all your digital purchases disappear. Certainly with giants such as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Steam, this will not happen in the foreseeable future. Google Stadia was a different story, but that service’s demise was seen coming a mile away. Fortunately, in that tragic case, players are still compensated in a decent way; they get their money back from all purchases. However, for Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Steam players, there’s no need to worry about your library of games.
The only thing you have to take into account is that games are sometimes taken offline due to expired licences. This happened, for example, with ‘Tony Hawk’ and some ‘Forza’ games, which are no longer for sale in online stores. That is unfortunately unavoidable and very unfortunate. Fortunately, that is only a handful of examples and the games almost never disappear from your library. Therefore, the chance that you suddenly lose half of your games because the licences expire is nil.
Less Plastic
Then we have the environmental problem. Within all kinds of sectors, we do everything we can to use as little plastic as possible, but in the gaming world, it is still the most normal thing to put heaps of plastic on the shelves. If there are a lot of benefits to that, it might be worth it, but now it’s really time to stop. The consequences of too much plastic can be disastrous for nature and of course, we want to fight that, or at least, do not want to contribute to it!
There are also enough signs on the wall that the industry is moving towards a digital future. For example, Microsoft and Sony released a full digital current-gen console for the first time. Sony even seems to go a step further by replacing the current PlayStation 5 models with a model with a detachable disk drive. That’s purely speculative, as Sony hasn’t announced that machine yet, but it might just be the final step towards an all-digital landscape.
There are also enough signs on the wall that the industry is moving towards a digital future.
The Only Real Drawback
Still, there’s one thing that’s holding me back from going fully digital right now: the prices of tangible games. The prices in the digital PlayStation and Xbox stores are, and will remain, sky-high. New current-gen games are almost always for sale in the digital store for seventy or even eighty euros. There is no competition, so the console farmers see no reason to lower those prices quickly.
A good example in that area is God of War. You pay eighty euros in the PlayStation Store, while I ordered the tangible version for 67 euros. The same applies to Splatoon 3. It costs the full sixty euros in the eShop, while you can find the tangible version online for fifty euros. Not a huge difference perhaps, but in the long run, you will save a lot of money.
However, when the prices in the digital stores are comparable to the tangible versions, I say goodbye forever to buying unnecessary plastic with a licence check in it. I’ve never been a collector and I don’t need one any more. Games no longer take up space and I can play them from the comfort of my chair without messing with discs. Especially on the Nintendo Switch, the latter is a hassle that fiddling with those small cartridges must be done once.
