The game: Guilty Gear Xrd Sign
The place: Gamestop, Commerce Court location
The Dillemma: Should I buy the retail copy, or download the game from PSN
Normally,
this is a no brainer. A niche Japanese title with a limited run
supported by a diehard fanbase. It's an instant grab just for
collecting purposes. But there is also the flip side. My home is
running out
of space for physical copies of games. I'm still super busy working on
Dragon Age Inquisition and I've got tonnes of backlogged games like
Assassin's Creed Unity. Finally, it's actually cheaper on PSN and I
don't have to pay any sales tax. In the end, I
bought a couple of PSN cards and called it a day. Download won.
The
collector in me is screaming bloody murder right now. I've pretty much
turned my back on a decade of game buying habits. A niche Japanese
game, more often than not, tend to have resale values greater than the
price
paid but a downloadable copy is basically worthless to a collector.
Still, times have changed and I think, so is the art of collecting
games. For one thing, a limited edition of Guilty Gear Xrd exists and
anyone serious about collecting the game would get
that instead. For another, I want to play the game, not have it sit on
the shelf, which means the need to crack open the packaging and
thereby, diminishing the resale value. Underlying all that, however, is
the one realization that games just aren't worth
collecting anymore.
I
came to this conclusion while browsing Guilty Gear Xrd on PSN.
Already, there is an extra downloadable character available for free.
That's when it hit me. Is the physical copy of a game going to be worth
anything
when, right out of the box, it's already missing a character? The
answer is no, of course not. This isn't like the old days. You buy
Street Fighter for the SNES with 8 playable character, wait 20 years,
and you will still have a game with 8 playable characters.
This has changed. If I bought Guilty Gear Xrd 20 years from now, I
would actually have LESS characters than buying it this afternoon. 20
years from now, will PSN still be around? Even if the extra character
is one of those on-disk-DLCs, will I need to hack
a PS4 to access it? Why jump through fancy hoops just to enjoy a 20
year old game?
I
know I'm talking in theoreticals. 20 years from now, there will
probably be more Guilty Gear sequals, rendering Xrd pretty much
useless. But what I described can be applied to just about any number
of games. You
name it, it's there. Senran Kagura? DLC characters just came out.
Persona 4 Arena Ultimax? It had free characters for download too.
Almost every game these days will be 'incomplete' in 20 years just
because access to some content will be locked out.
Owning the disks maybe worthless. Not all games are like this,
however. Collecting is still viable but you really have to do some
research. For instance, as far as I know, Dangan Rompa 1 and 2 are
still good as stand alone games with no DLCs in sight.
That's more of an exception, however.
Gamestop
corporate CEO said recently that game prices have dropped beyond a
sustainable point. People aren't willing to pay more than $35 for a new
game even if the game is AAA caliber. I read this on a news site, and
one of the commenters had a very good point. He says that games are
basically worthless right now in the long term and most people know
this. Factoring in DRMs (digital rights management) locking out games,
always online features, DLCs, day one patches,
etc. and your physical copy of the game is nearly worthless. At least,
before, if you buy a game for 60 bucks and beat it in a month, you can
still expect a reasonable trade in value. Nowadays, people are getting
smart and realizing that physical disks just
don't have the same value anymore.
I'm
seriously thinking about buying games digitally from now on as
default. If a game is on sale physically, I'll make an exception and
get that instead. A lot of games can be pre-downloaded these days and
that makes
wait times a non issue. There are other reasons to get physical
copies, but those reasons get thinner and thinner year after year…
Just
a quick cap: I downloaded Sunset Overdrive on the Xbox One because
Gamestop didn't have physical copies. Later, I bought a physical copy
of Assassin's Creed Unity and, as I was putting it into the maching,
something
nagged at me. Didn't I have to take out the Sunset disk before putting
in the Unity disk? I had totally forgotten downloading Sunselt Over
drive. I gave a mental shrug. One less thing to worry
about.
