To Download or Not to Download

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.