Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.
I’m probably just getting pessimistic with age, but corporations just see dollar signs with subscriptions and reduced expenses with digital distribution. Then they will outlive you and me.
It may be objectively better for players to have physical copies of their games installed on hardware they have dominion over, but we are unlikely to be around to prove that to our great grandkids. We can’t even guarantee even our own children will care enough to try to tell theirs. I’m almost certain owning physical copies of digital content is going to be for niche hobbyists in the future.
People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I’d say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that’s often just a fancy form of DRM.
Latency is enough of a thing that even a child raised on it will recognize the benefits of running the game locally, not to mention mods and other privileges that come with having a local copy of a game.
I’m probably just getting pessimistic with age, but corporations just see dollar signs with subscriptions and reduced expenses with digital distribution. Then they will outlive you and me.
It may be objectively better for players to have physical copies of their games installed on hardware they have dominion over, but we are unlikely to be around to prove that to our great grandkids. We can’t even guarantee even our own children will care enough to try to tell theirs. I’m almost certain owning physical copies of digital content is going to be for niche hobbyists in the future.
People always talk about this being physical versus digital, but I’d say this is about DRM. Physical media decays. DRM-free games can be perfectly copied over and over again, and it comes with the bonus of not taking up space in my apartment. If a game requires a server to connect to or stream from, that’s often just a fancy form of DRM.