Well I don't need to worry as much about scratches since I buy 95% of my games on PS3. Which uses blu ray discs with scratch resistant coating. I have PS3 launch titles that I have played a lot that look brand new. I also have bought over 30 used games and only 1 of them was scratched(by looks of it from a car key). PS3 games are so hard to scratch that you would literally have to scratch it yourself for it to happen. Can you guarantee that steam will be around in 10-20 years? Online services come and go and your content would go with it. Backing up is a option for you but its not for PS3 and 360 gamers, so any content we buy now might be rendered useless in 10 - 20 years. Just in case you say, "you probably won't even play it in 10 - 20 years anyway." Thats untrue, as I type I have my old NES hooked up and I am in the middle of playing Super Mario Bros 3. I never stop playing old games and I would like the security of knowing that I will actually have access to my old games in future. With digital content, the service could go down anytime. While I could have my content saved on my hard drive when it happens, if I ever accidently delete it. It would be gone for ever.
I would never say "you won't even play it in 10 - 20 years" since I too have my old Famicom and SNES and play them occasionally. Not to mention the fact that older games tend to have better gameplay and more timeless design, but that's for a different discussion altogether...
However, in the case of my SNES, my cartridges have actually degraded over time since the tiny batteries that power the savegames have died long ago - just a fact of the technology used at the time. I can certainly still play the games and even replace the batteries, but the fact is that technology moves on and obsolescence is only around the corner: if something can do it cheaper, faster, more securely, and using less volume, then that's the direction development will take.
It's not that time yet for digital distribution, though it's getting closer. When CDs came along I had friends who insisted on keeping multiple floppy disks just in case CDs turned out to be a quick fad, and for years I resisted switching to DVDs because my VHS was cheaper and did everything I needed. But the future has a way of creeping up on you, and sooner or later you either have to give in or be left behind. With so little retail space devoted to PC games, it's no wonder that PC gaming tends to take the lead in switching to an all-digital medium.
As for Steam going down eventually, I imagine there will come a time at some point, yes, but with enormous sign-posts that give their many millions of customers an opportunity to download backups before the service goes down for good. But let's look at it in perspective: Valve is more profitable per head than Google or Microsoft, and none of the companies seem in any danger of changing their business plans one iota. The likelihood of Steam collapsing after the investment Valve have made is less probable than Microsoft abandoning Windows forever. So again I wonder which will last longer: Valve and their Steam, or my increasingly-battered DVDs? (It could be a close race at 50 years or so...)
You do have a point about consoles being better suited for disks, and I think a lot of that also has to do with the "tradition" (for lack of a better word) of having a cartridge you can just plug in and play straight away, which I've always considered the best feature consoles have over PCs. But you have to admit, as a PS3 owner, that there's been a lot of feature creep in consoles in recent years: more downloadable content, demos, promos, trailers, turning consoles ever more into PCs. So the future may be more similar for all gamers after all, regardless of platform.
Never scratched or lost a CD/DVD. I have forgotten my Steam password, though - I didn't use it much for the first year or two, and had the password set to "remember" so I never had to type it in.
-------
(Another reason I like having the physical media - I have a small WinXP partition on my iMac. I uninstall & reinstall games constantly. And even if I had a large HD, I still uninstall & reinstall gamesas games - I like doing a clean install for each different set of mods that I try. Downloading a game once is bad enough. But the dozen or more times that I've installed Oblivion, for example? Bleh.)
---
Digital download is great for some things - Minecraft, for instance, would never have had a chance if it had needed to get a publisher and stocked in stores. Same for a lot of other small, "indie" games. But it's not the be-all, end-all.
You're right, digital distribution doesn't do everything for everybody (and, as much as is possible, I feel there should always be an attempt at giving customers a choice.) But here's the thing: gaming isn't for everybody. It's a relatively expensive hobby, requires investment in specific technology, and we've come to take it for granted that everyone has, for example, a permanent supply of electricity. The question then becomes what level and type of technology should be supported (and recommended) - there was a time when games came out on both floppy and CD, in case people had not yet adopted CD drives, but that practice has long since stopped, and no computer (except mine, maybe
) even has a floppy drive any more. I think we'll see a similar process for digital distribution in the next 20 years - granted, the level of infrastructure is somewhat more demanding (landlines being more costly to upgrade than disk drives) but the principle is the same.
It's true, however, that disks can access where landlines may not. It may be faster to send a DVD to a rural area by post than to download it directly. One of my lecturers at university gave the example of either transporting a truck full of DVDs or downloading through a fibreoptic cable: the truck won, even accounting for heavy traffic. However, for most average users, and for most average applications, it's both faster and simpler to download directly than to proxy through a physical medium - here in England at least postal strikes are more common than power outages. :laugh:
As for the tremendous opportunity it gives to indies to get their games to the public, that alone is reason enough to support a digital medium.
» Wed Jun 09, 2010 2:07 am 
