Posted: 5/28/2025 12:02:10 PM EDT
| Gen X here. Just a curiosity question. I always ordered the disk on line. Never purchased and hit down load. Any advantage either way ? Wardawg |
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I have a nice shelf of big box PC games from the 90s that I proudly display, however I'd find it annoying as a PC gamer if for the last 10-15 years I still had to go into a store, buy the game, install off a CD-Rom, then keep the disc in while the game is on. Steam is the greatest thing that happened to gamers in the history of gaming. I feel the same for latest consoles. My PS5 has a few physical games but it's annoying when I want to play it and I forgot I bought the physical edition, I then have to dig it out of the cube in the shelf to find it. I get the arguments against digital, you really don't own the games, with the exception of GOG, if Steam couldn't launch, most games couldn't be played even if you go to the source .exe file and try to run it. Again, it's a game-to-game issue, but I'll take the convenience of digital and instant startup over going back to physical everything. |
"The only way to stop a bad man with a Monocled Cobra is a good guy with a Mongoose". - soowah
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Originally Posted By FIGHTNIGHT: It seems they both take the same amount of space on my hard drive so I just download a copy. My PS5 doesn't have a disc rom anymore. When my internet goes out I do pull out the PS4 and play some games offline. That does make me want to go back to discs For the first 2 years of my house we had intermittent internet problems and yeah it's annoying, but I had plenty of offline games in Steam that still played. Steam will obviously tell you that you're not connected and cloud saves won't sync but you can still play the games. |
"The only way to stop a bad man with a Monocled Cobra is a good guy with a Mongoose". - soowah
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Originally Posted By MauserMark: For the first 2 years of my house we had intermittent internet problems and yeah it's annoying, but I had plenty of offline games in Steam that still played. Steam will obviously tell you that you're not connected and cloud saves won't sync but you can still play the games. |
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Originally Posted By WarDawg: Gen X here. Just a curiosity question. I always ordered the disk on line. Never purchased and hit down load. Any advantage either way ? Wardawg. I much prefer the CD/DVD version to Digital. YMMV. |
LARUEMINATI
NRA Endowment Life Member
Originally Posted By Boom_Stick:
""AKs are for villagers you have to tell not to shit in their water supply.""
NRA Endowment Life Member
Originally Posted By Boom_Stick:
""AKs are for villagers you have to tell not to shit in their water supply.""
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I'm a mix. All PC gaming is digital (vast majority of my library is on Steam). Most console gaming is physical. I still sometimes purchase collector's editions of games. I guess the difference is that the console is "obsolete" and replaced in a few years, and I'm still playing PC games from 30 years ago on an otherwise new PC. |
"Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.” - Fulton J. Sheen
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I wish I had physical everything. I enjoy playing sniper elite, and have purchased each game. Suddenly Xbox is telling me that I don’t own them, and I can only play the most recent release. Digital downloads are great, but I wish there was still an option to be sent a copy (like there used to be). |
Stick
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Originally Posted By TaskForce: Both. I play digitally but if it's something I want to own I'll buy it physically. This |
"Makes me realize why there are warning labels on hemorrhoid cream about not using it orally" - Weomi
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Originally Posted By FIGHTNIGHT: I need to look into steam. I honestly don't know much about it. Steam is a digital game distribution library. You join up (free) & install the Steam app, buy, download, & play whatever games you like through your games library. Yes, you can play the games in offline mode, but progress isn't saved. That's probably the only hitch. |
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I prefer physical copies, where the entire game is on that disc, but that will never happen anymore. I dislike the whole "you paid for a license key, you don't own it" bullshit mentality. I am fine with Steam, it's been around for a long time and won't be going anywhere. Certain games I really wish had collectors edition physicals that aren't so limited in run. I like buying certain collectors editions, but I don't just buy any, and haven't in recent years. |
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I prefer physical copies but if the game won't run without the internet and some server existing then it doesn't really matter. I would prefer games, at least the single player portion, be playable without the internet and without using the disc to still download the game from the internel... In 20 years I want to be able to discover some old discs and a xbox/ps5 in a box, dust them off, install and play without any reliance on some outside connection. |
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Originally Posted By FIGHTNIGHT: I need to look into steam. I honestly don't know much about it Steam is to video games what iTunes is to music. |
If you own M&P40 Ser. CPD1915 I will trade you a new M&P40 M2 for it. It belonged to a friend of mind who is deceased.
For console games, I 100% prefer disks. All of my PC games have been digital for decades now. I usually only buy a game when it's for sale under $10-15 these days. My backlog is big enough  Do they even have real physical versions of PC games anymore? |
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Originally Posted By MeatBag: Do they even have real physical versions of PC games anymore? There are even official tools (SteamCMD) to rip installation packages from Steam so they’re available later (only for any games you already have access to). Steam emulators will let you run those with no internet connection, or for LAN play. |
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| I don't even remember the last time I got a physical disk. But I have a collection of physical disks because I used to buy a lot of them. Now it's easier to play games online; if you have Steam or something else, there is no need to buy discs. Also, you can play some games on a browser. I play casino games pretty often, and there is no need to buy them or download them. Lately, I've been playing at cashwin and can say that it's one of the best casinos, and the games are so good. I found information about it pretty random, but I decided to try, and it was the right decision. |
| Old school here, still own all my physical copies of pc games from the 90s. I’d prefer to have the actual media, but they make that kinda hard running sales on digital copies. Be nice if you could throw steam a few bucks after a digital purchase to get a hard copy in the mail. |
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My gaming PC doesn’t have an optical drive, and I can’t remember the last time I saw a PC game on a shelf at a store, so it’s all downloads. Most of the games on my PS5 are digital as well, but I have some physical PS4 games that I play on it. I just pre ordered BF6 as a physical copy because the HDD space on the PS5 is getting a little spare, so I want to reduce the amount of installed data for that game. |
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Physical disk, for as long as possible. For one, I hate the download time. I downloaded Red Dead Redemption once and that shit took around 24 hours to download. Then, whenever I need more storage space for a game to update, I need to delete it. Then, when I want to play, I download it for another 24 hours. With the disk, I'd just be able to pop it right in, and the updates would take significantly less space on the HD. Second, I typically buy games used. Occasionally, you can get a digital game for cheap, but most of the time, I can get it cheaper off eBay or a local game store. Then, months or even a few years later, I can resell the disk to someone else and get some of my money back. With digital, there are no resales. Fuck that. |
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I had an XB1 boxed up with some game CDs, 2 in particular that I wanted to port to PC & run through an emulator. 1 of those games was the OG "Ninja Gaiden 2", an XB1 title that the console could install on a flash drive, then transferred to PC. This OG version of the game is exclusively available for download via XBL to XB console users. The "NG2 Black" game available for PC on Steam is a neutered version of the OG NG2 game I have. It was made to run on slower PS4 hardware, with reduced NPC enemy screen count, & it had less "graphic depiction", if you will. Having a physical CD + the console to rip the game made it possible to get this OG version of the game that the studio itself won't even acknowledge exists anymore (Huge fallout backstory between the studio & the OG NG & NG2 games directer, Tomonobu Itagaki, which I suspect comes down to denying him royalties as well as just plain old bad blood). It's essentially impossible to get it for PC without a physical CD & a way - an XB1 console with the file transfer feature still intact - to transfer the game files to transferable media. As DRM gets shoved further down the consumer's throat, game ownership seems to be becoming old school. I hate it, & will avoid buying any game that I cannot independently own. |
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Am I missing something in this thread? Even grabbing a physical copy is only 4.7g worth of data. You gotta download the rest regardless of how you feel about it. So it makes for a nice box on the shelf sorta thing but I can’t remember the last thing I bought that fit on a couple DVDs. Crysis 1 maybe? It’s been a while Unless someone out there is selling AAA games with like 20 discs in it? |
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Originally Posted By Blind_Squirrel: Am I missing something in this thread? Even grabbing a physical copy is only 4.7g worth of data. You gotta download the rest regardless of how you feel about it. So it makes for a nice box on the shelf sorta thing but I can’t remember the last thing I bought that fit on a couple DVDs. Crysis 1 maybe? It’s been a while Unless someone out there is selling AAA games with like 20 discs in it? I like having the nice box on the shelf. |
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Originally Posted By Blind_Squirrel: Am I missing something in this thread? Even grabbing a physical copy is only 4.7g worth of data. You gotta download the rest regardless of how you feel about it. So it makes for a nice box on the shelf sorta thing but I can’t remember the last thing I bought that fit on a couple DVDs. Crysis 1 maybe? It’s been a while Unless someone out there is selling AAA games with like 20 discs in it? This, and a gigabit internet connection is going to download that 4.7gb of data four times faster than a 24x DVD drive can read it. |
