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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • You can still re-download your purchases from 3DS / DSi Ware / Wii (unless it changed since the last time I checked). Same goes for Steam even for unlisted games. It’s a problem that I am still waiting to see. And even then, just copy the data in advance on extra memory (which is inexpensive when the time to make backups comes).

    If your console breaks, you can buy another one, link your account, and re-download your games. You can apply the same logic on games which won’t last forever (there are notorious issues with 3DS games that are dying, and CD-based games are doomed to rot like many PS1 games at the moment). The problems you raise will potentially happen at some point, but physical games (especially those sold nowadays) have also their own problems. You can also get robbed or have a fire at your house (in which cases going full digital is an advantage).

    For preservation itself, legal solutions are doing little to nothing. Even if you count physical as a way to do it (which I disagree since the games are just incomplete and in their worst state), the prices going up because of speculation makes many of them unreachable to most people at some point. Piracy / emulation remains the only way to preserve video games efficiently (but it should not be praised for consoles still in production of course, we should let them die first).


  • I am 100% with you on this one.

    I was against DLCs and digital games when they first came up with the PS360 generation. But physical games are generally incomplete, the boxes and support aren’t appealing to me anymore (removing the booklet was exactly when I gave up). You are not even playing from the discs anymore, all disc games are « game key cards » once your game is installed.

    I went 100% digital since the Switch, much easier to handle and preserve, much more compact than stacking DVD boxes.

    It was already an issue on Switch for some games. They just clarified when games are not complete, provided cheap carts for such games to reduce the cost. It’s not Nintendo’s fault if most editors are doing this. Nintendo is not doing it (at least for now). But as soon as you need a patch or a DLC, your physical games will be incomplete anyway.