@Pedro: That’s the thing. Archiving is something that companies don’t want and will fight especially if there is any distribution going on. They’d love to sell games again or loan games to people in an always online platform that they 100% control.
Physical is not the only way but it’s still the best and easiest way to keep stuff without having to worry about the increasing roadblocks that companies place to make archiving harder. That’s why there’s this love of live service games from publishers. Outside of potential continuous revenue, they can shut it all down whenever they want people to move on (Overwatch 2) or when it stops making money (see any live service mobile game).
I have a digital of Marvel vs Capcom 2 on PS3. A disk version (if there was one) will probably out live the mechanical HDD inside and the PS3 itself. There are ways to archive it or place it on multiple HDDs but I have to do all this BS and be signed in to another PSN account etc. it’s made to be difficult by design. Then one day there will be a time where there will be no way to redownload purchased games. How long do you think these companies will keep people on the payroll maintaining these legacy platform store fonts to support a small percentage of people who care?
Hot swapping a redundant HDD when the system can non longer connect to PSN to check the HDD leaves you with a brick that you will have a difficult time getting encrypted data off of.
Then there’s DRM and other online checks embedded into most digital games and unfortunately several modern physical games as well.
Also while emulation is coming a long way, playing on original hardware is still the best way to play 100% of the library a console with the way it was intended and best performance. Maybe not so much for these modern games shipping out broken but thats an entirely different topic. As the pool of available hardware shrinks, I might have to pay a lot of money down the line to get a console, but at least that’s something.
Log in to comment