One of the biggest rallying cries around my Twitter feed—made primarily up of gamers and game journalists, with the occasional Ellen Paige tweet thrown in to spice things up—is for the death of physical media. Movies, music, videogames, many on my feed are looking forward to the day when they can shuck off the need for collecting discs and can instead pipe everything in from the cloud. Perhaps listening to folks like the ones I follow on Twitter, Sony recently announced plans to release several big-name games digitally on the same day they hit store shelves, a bold move considering how much retailers like to keep their shelf space uncontested by the likes of digital media.
I'm pleased that Sony has decided to make digitally downloads an option for consumers who want it; more options are always better than less options. Still, I'm not sure if I'm ready to throw away my discs and go download-only.
For one thing, my internet connection simply couldn't support an all-digital future. I'm not sure if I should blame my router or my service provider, but I still need to buffer my YouTube videos on occasion. I'm going to repeat it again for emphasis: my YouTube videos. If I can't even pull up a cat video without my connection huffing and puffing to catch up, I'm certainly not going to be able to simply *get* an HD movie on a whim. In fact, I tried to rent an HD movie on my Apple TV one time: the service told me to come back in six hours. Not quite what I'd call convenient. That's not even bringing up bandwidth caps, a hassle I thankfully don't have to worry about, but can be an issue for folks in bigger cities where this sort of thing exists.
As convenient as it is to click and download a game or movie from the cloud, I prefer having actual discs, if for no other reason than they help me keep track of my collection. I'm an absent-minded guy, and if i don't have a physical reminder of what's in my collection, I tend to forget. I bought the first Mass Effect digitally on my Xbox 360, but I rarely played it because I seldom remembered that I actually owned it on my Xbox. This problem doesn't extend to games I download from Xbox Live Arcade (well, not always), and I'm sure it's a mental thing. Xbox Live Arcade games are generally smaller, less intense experiences, and feel fine staying in the My Games portion of the Dashboard. In fact, maybe that's why I balk at the idea of downloading full games to my Xbox: my expectations for retail and downloadable games are different, and bringing them together under the same umbrella feels weird. Maybe I'll get over it.
Aside from my peculiar memory issues and game expectations, I simply like having physical things. Packaging often factors in to my purchase decisions (like yesterday when I have a small emotional crisis because the disc of The Avengers I bought was a bright shade of gold instead of its regular blue), and I like the way my catalog of games and movies look on my shelves. I like collecting things, and being able to marvel at my spoils is its own reward.
There's also the matter of how I share my content. I like taking my movies with me when I go on trips; I even took a Blu-ray player to PAX so I could watch The Rescuers Down Under in my hotel room. I like loaning out games to my friends or borrowing them for a spell. Digital downloads make both of these impractical. It isn't like music downloads—the most obvious analog for what movies and games are trying to accomplish—where I have plenty of options to play my new Green Day album outside of a CD player (car adapters, portable speakers, etc.). If I digitally purchase Darksiders II for my Xbox 360, it's staying there, and if I want my friends want to borrow it, they're gonna have to take the whole damn console.
Not to say that digital downloads are always a bummer. I like being able to download PC games and play them without a disc, though this has to do with my expectations of using a PC; I don't have to insert a disc every time I want to use Microsoft Word or Skype, so requiring additional steps to play videogames feels weird. I've also been eying a download version of Rock Band 3 for my Xbox 360, which also has to deal with my expectations: Rock Band has always been more of a platform than an individual game, and I never feel like I "need" the disc since I've bought so many songs as DLC. Besides, plastic instruments are huge, and there's no way I'll forget I have those.
I hope more publishers will follow Sony's lead in releasing my games day-and-date with their retail counterparts. That said, I'm not about to cast my lot in a digital-only future just yet. Instead, I'd rather see a future where both digital and physical co-exist, giving consumers the best of both worlds.
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