Unifying your whole collection on one system. Lazy Netflix style accessing your library.
For me this is more enticing on a handheld, the feeling of always having all your games with you, on hand. I kinda have this already, but having a cart case and mutiple sds it's not quite the Digital dream.
- Recover your collection should your system or games be stolen or damaged.
With your account you can log back in and redownload your games.
If my physical games get stolen or damaged they are gone forever.
PLUS side for Physical
- you don't eat up precious HDD space, although games usually require a hefty download anyway.
If they could make larger physical carts with room to download updates onto the cart itself that would fix the problem. Don't know if it's technically or financially feasible.
Downside to digital
- Let's say in the future Nintendo, Sony or whatever die or shut down the eshops
If your sd card gets corrupted you lose dozens of games. Rather than losing one physical disc and having the rest survive.
Sure you can back up digital games but the cost of HDD space makes this unfeasible at times.
- DOWNSIDE, Digital games can be tied to the particular system you own. In the distant future when your device craps out and can't be repaired you lose your games (Wii virtual console)
Ravenprose said:I'm all digital except for Nintendo. That's because Nintendo is one of the only companies that still ship playable games on physical media. What's the point of buying a PS5 disk if half the game must be downloaded from a server anyway?
On Switch im mostly physical with Nintendo first party.
Digital with virtually everything else with the odd exception, as the prices drop so low.
I'd probably go digital with Nintendo games too if the price went as low as third party.
You have a point about physical games with a huge download.
So I have games stored digitally across multiple sd cards on switch.
When a game is stored on a card not currently installed, I never really play it.
Because I'm on a FPS kick I have my secondary card in switch for Wolfenstein.
But that card has other games on it I haven't played in ages. So I opened the folder to see all the games on it and on a whim I clicked and started playing RE6 and Crysis 2.
And I realised the only way I could do this, play on a whim, was because it was stored and instantly accessible.
And it reminded me of what a pain it is to remove and replace sd cards, let alone cartridges.
Now the load times off an sd card for those games was hilariously long. But that made me anticipate having a micro sd express card for Switch 2. And loading these games 9x faster. It's highly tempting and I'm glad I held off buying a slower 1tb card now.
So the disadvantages, extra HDD space costs money, more so for tiny micro sds, not solid bad for external SSDs for other systems.
So for me, at the moment there are no 2tb micro sd express cards out. And they'd likely cost £240 or something ridiculous.
The cost advantage is that you can get massive savings on digital games, Doom for £5.99, Call of Juarez for £2 etc.