The truth is digital video game downloads are better than physical games

Metro

17-05-2025

A reader argues that people are overstating the downsides of buying video games digitally and that there's good reason it's become so popular.
I feel like all the benefits of digital gaming are increasingly dismissed, without acknowledgement that it's getting to the point where this insistence that it's solely limited to 'getting up to change discs' feels like some sort of deliberate and reductive propaganda.
I'm not a champion of digital by any means. The fact that my digital game collection is now far bigger than my physical one went almost unnoticed by me at first. But I think if you want to understand a market, you need to acknowledge the facts and the nuances of the situation instead of relying on emotion driven instinct.
Digital stores feel much more present and accessible than physical ones, whether through dedicated apps, comms channels or the console dashboard giving full exposure. The near constant and extremely generous sales means we're more likely to become aware of good deals and to make spontaneous purchases than if we had to browse separate websites or walk into a shop at our own discretion.
It can't stop with visibility and advertising, though. Digital game sharing is a major feature on all platforms, not only as some sort of loophole but something officially publicised in detail by all the platform holders. If I buy a game digitally, my sharing partner gets it (immediately and permanently) for free and vice versa. If we're organised, every full priced game we both want is half price on day one. This, and the constant sales have led to a huge inflation of each of our digital backlogs with very little (if any) noticeable impact on our spending.
Where does a wider trend like that lead? An onus on platform holders to make backwards compatibility a universal standard. In hindsight it's almost absurd to think the previous PlayStations and Xboxes had no backwards compatibility, or even that there was much doubt that the Switch 2 would offer it.
And yet now we all have big backlogs because we're buying more games without necessarily spending more, and various aspects of digital creep have contributed to that. In earlier generational transitions I doubt most of us would have cared at all if we could keep access to whatever we were leaving behind but now a failure to offer backwards compatibility would be a huge source of controversy.
Ultimately, people who insist they're 'priced out of gaming', because of digital distribution or anything other than escalating hardware costs, are either sorely mistaken or they're deliberately inaccurate. At worst what they really mean is they're priced out of buying AAA games on the day of their release, on the basis that they now have to commit to that spending.
I appreciate the argument that if everyone waits for sales of digital games because they don't want to pay full price for something they can't sell on – or even if half as many people buy games on day one because of game sharing – that could be problematic for the commercial performance of new games.
But constant on-selling would equate to much less new money being injected into the market anyway. I don't see it being any better if a customer can quickly consume three or four (or 10) games on day one for just £60-£80, that was paid months or years ago, compared to if they bought that many games at that cost in total a while after release.
Hype and fear of missing out will continue to fuel day one spending on a lot of AAA games but those phenomena on their own don't entitle us to all games ASAP without us contributing much to the market. More Trending
I'm not going to claim there's no downside to the physical market being phased out. Aside from the ability for us to recoup some spending, I can imagine how sharply brick and mortar stores have had to pivot in order to survive. But, bottom line, digital gaming wouldn't have been so successful if the businesses responsible weren't offering clear benefits. So the idea that it's just about appealing to our laziness is itself a lazy (not to mention reductive and disingenuous) take.
By reader Panda
The reader's features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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