2491: No, I Won’t “Stop Buying Physical Video Games Already!”

This argument seems to crop up every so often as we move ever-onwards into the supposed “digital age”, and this time around it was clumsily espoused by Damon Beres of The Huffington Post.

The thrust of Beres’ argument is that because digital sales are up, we should all simply stop buying physical products. “[The rise] is pretty good news for one reason in particular,” he argues. “Physical video games are basically obsolete wastes of space and resources.”

I can see where he’s coming from to an extent. Physical games take up space that not everyone has. If you’re living in a particularly cramped apartment, for example, you may not want to devote lots of shelves to DVD-size cases when they could be better used for something else — or perhaps even abandoned entirely for those who have gone truly Spartan in their accommodation arrangements.

But Beres’ argument is flawed thanks to a few factual inaccuracies, and one absolutely honking issue, the latter of which we’ll come on to in a moment.

“You may not realise it,” says Beres, “but if you’re gaming on a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, the actual disc you buy at the store doesn’t really do much. Games need to be installed on your system’s hard drive because the consoles can’t run games directly off the Blu-Ray discs.”

False. Running games from disc is often a much more efficient use of the limited hard drive space both the PS4 and XB1 have available to them, since many games only install the most important files to the hard drive and then pull the data from the disc itself as required. There are exceptions to this rule — graphically intensive triple-A games tend to do full installs to quicken load times, for example — but the last few games I’ve played on my PS4 booted up straight away after putting the disc in, suggesting that the game perhaps only installed the main executable file and most frequently accessed data files and little else.

Beres continues his argument thus: “Gaming is also more convenient when you move to a digital library. Any games you want are stored on your hard drive and boot up the moment you select them — no getting off of the couch to switch discs out.”

Also false… sort of. With entry-level PS4 and XB1 systems only having 500GB hard drives (and the Wii U having an even more pathetic 32GB straight out of the box), there is a hard limit to how many digital games you can have installed on your console at once, after which you will need to delete them and re-download them at a later date if you want to play them again. And with more substantial games weighing in around the 50GB mark, this is a long download, even on fibre-optic broadband; much longer than the time it takes to get a disc down from a shelf and put it in a slot.

This brings us neatly onto the humdinger of the point that Beres has failed to address at all in his article: the question of archiving. At present, we have access to digital console games at the whim of Sony and Microsoft. Sure, right now we can redownload our games as many times as we want if we need to shuffle the contents of our consoles’ hard drives around, but what happens in another 5-10 years when a true next generation of consoles shows up? I certainly don’t believe that Sony and Microsoft are going to keep the respective digital download stores for old platforms available forever; Sony has already shuttered the PSP’s PlayStation Store access, for example, forcing those who hadn’t already downloaded their purchases to upgrade to a Vita or PlayStation TV if they want to keep their content. I find myself wondering how long the PS3 PlayStation Store will survive… hopefully they’ll at least wait until I’ve played my PlayStation Plus copy of Yakuza 5.

This is less of an issue on PC, where we’re not locked into a specific storefront, despite a significant chunk of gamers choosing to make use of Valve’s digital platform Steam as their default means of managing their gaming library — at least partly due to the regular deep discounts we get on even brand new titles on most digital platforms. If Steam were to shut down tomorrow, there are a wide variety of other places on the Internet where you can download the same games, be it alternative digital storefronts such as GOG.com, or even directly from developers’ and publishers’ websites. PC gamers are also free to back their games up onto physical media whenever they like, and PC gaming is also less subject to the “generational” issues that consoles have, since with each new iteration of the popular operating systems, there are talented developers — amateur and professional alike — dedicated to ensuring that old games continue to work on modern systems.

With consoles, however, we don’t have those failsafes in place. If PSN or Xbox Live goes down, no digital games for you. If and when those storefronts close permanently, you’d better hope you’d already downloaded everything you want to keep, otherwise it’s lost forever — a potent reminder of the oft-quoted condition in most software’s licensing agreements that you are not buying the software itself, merely the right to use it.

Keep a library of discs and cartridges, however, and you can always play your games, regardless of whether you have an Internet connection or if the services in question are working correctly. Keep a library of discs and you get to archive these experiences for future generations — or indeed for yourself — to be able to enjoy ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.

This may not be a priority for every gameplayer — the sort of person who plays nothing but yearly Call of Duty or FIFA installments is unlikely to care, for example, since they tend to play with the mindset that games are disposable experiences — but for those who value gaming as a form of creative expression, as a crafted entertainment experience or even as art will almost certainly want to keep “the games shelf” around for many years to come.