Nightdive Studios, The Strong Museum, and the Videogame Heritage Society discuss how to preserve games in the digital age
I used to buy physical as much as I could, but nowadays it doesn’t mean anything, so I don’t care as much about it.
Flash memory cartridges die, even faster in cases of bad batches. Optical discs have disc rot (again, some worse than others). Many many games have updates, DLCs or patches that won’t be on the physical medium. Plenty of games coming on discs have to be fully installed on the machine’s drive anyway because disc drives are too slow.
Most indie games, including some of the best experiences out there, never get physical versions, or only very limited ones.
The only way to preserve is to duplicate and archive everything, even if it’s not easy. Keeping original physical media as a souvenir is nice, but it doesn’t achieve long term preservation.
I am 100% with you on this one.
I was against DLCs and digital games when they first came up with the PS360 generation. But physical games are generally incomplete, the boxes and support aren’t appealing to me anymore (removing the booklet was exactly when I gave up). You are not even playing from the discs anymore, all disc games are « game key cards » once your game is installed.
I went 100% digital since the Switch, much easier to handle and preserve, much more compact than stacking DVD boxes.
It was already an issue on Switch for some games. They just clarified when games are not complete, provided cheap carts for such games to reduce the cost. It’s not Nintendo’s fault if most editors are doing this. Nintendo is not doing it (at least for now). But as soon as you need a patch or a DLC, your physical games will be incomplete anyway.
Just one thing to note, that the difference between copying all data to disc vs downloading is of requiring internet. There are still many places in the world where requiring internet access, specially for big downloads can be an issue.
Other than that, I agree with you. And for people with good internet connection, that difference doesn’t matter anyway, both are similar for them.
Nintendo did it on at least one occasion, not counting games with big DLC that of course aren’t on the cartridge.
Bayonetta 2 came with 1 on Switch, but only 2 is on the cartridge, 1 is a download code.
Bayonetta 1 got a (limited?) physical release alongside 3.
Apparently so. Doesn’t change that 1+2 still had only half of its content on its cartridge.
Though they’d need a 32GB cart to put them on a single cartridge, and apparently those were used for like 12 games total. So maybe it would have been cheaper with 2 16GB. After all, the Wii U version of this pack had a physical disc for each game.
I agree with the person you replying, but not exactly with you.
You see even if you don’t have the dlc and patches with cartridges, you have something. 10-30 years from now, if Nintendo closes the eshop, like they did with 3ds, and your console breaks meanwhile (or you forget/cant download all the games you own), you are done. You have nothing. Same goes for Playststion, Steam etc.
Yeah digital games are convenient, but the only thing i know that offers some preservation/redundancy and is legal today, is GOG.
You can still re-download your purchases from 3DS / DSi Ware / Wii (unless it changed since the last time I checked). Same goes for Steam even for unlisted games. It’s a problem that I am still waiting to see. And even then, just copy the data in advance on extra memory (which is inexpensive when the time to make backups comes).
If your console breaks, you can buy another one, link your account, and re-download your games. You can apply the same logic on games which won’t last forever (there are notorious issues with 3DS games that are dying, and CD-based games are doomed to rot like many PS1 games at the moment). The problems you raise will potentially happen at some point, but physical games (especially those sold nowadays) have also their own problems. You can also get robbed or have a fire at your house (in which cases going full digital is an advantage).
For preservation itself, legal solutions are doing little to nothing. Even if you count physical as a way to do it (which I disagree since the games are just incomplete and in their worst state), the prices going up because of speculation makes many of them unreachable to most people at some point. Piracy / emulation remains the only way to preserve video games efficiently (but it should not be praised for consoles still in production of course, we should let them die first).
Despite their short lifespan, those forms of media were at least still rippable and enjoyable beyond the life of when the parent company says “you can’t enjoy this anymore!”
The memory of your console is rippable too. they might try to make it more difficult (and fuck that) but I’m sure someone will always be able to get those files one way or another.
If your digital game was installed, it worked perfectly during the outage.
But yes, if you wanted to play any other game from your library, that wasn’t installed, digital won’t work, but physical would have worked.
“Game-Key Cards” so it’s a licensing dongle with a fancy name and peculiar shape.
I can see both side of the arguments.
Many games are releasing with just a code in a physical box, which among other issues means people can’t resell those, with Game-key cards, at least people can resell these, and the next person can download the game too.
On the other hand, it is kind of officially sanctioning this practice of not releasing a full game on a cartridge, which can lead more companies to follow this example.
I guess it’s upto end users now, to vote with their wallet and let the companies know that they won’t buy these.
What are the other options that still release full games on a disc/cartridge? Sony and Microsoft already went “Download Discs” a long while ago. The Nintendo and the Switch 1 was the last hold out, and even some of its bigger games were eshop only. I keep having to look to third parties, like limitedrungames.com, to get physical editions, or having to import from a country where it did get a physical release.
There are still some games companies that release full games on disc, like Cyberpunk 2077 releasing full game on cartridge for Switch 2. There are other examples too, but they are getting less and less.
Oh that’s the funny part. Cyberpunk and the DLC, on a cartridge. Bravely Default, a DS game, download cart. It’s silly.
limitedrun.com is some other random website.
I fixed that. Thank you.
It kinda sucks how hard it is now to share a game with a friend. That was one of the main draws of console gaming for me; how you’d have ownership of the game to do with as you wished. PC gaming switched to predominately digital downloads years back, which is fine when you consider how affordable those games eventually become during Steam sales. But first party Nintendo games seem to hold their value and the sales are never that great, so you’re left with more expensive games and no longer the option to share them.
I do wonder what console manufacturers will do in order to keep at least some all-physical releases around as game sizes grow. Blu Ray has topped out at 128GB on the highest end discs, and flash storage isn’t dropping in price as quick as before for making larger cartridges. Maybe we will see more cases like Mario Kart World where the physical version is more expensive? However, I do think there might be less key card games as Switch 2 goes on, as likely a big motivation for key cards at launch is the current low production volume and high price of SD Express cards (which the cartridges are based on). Shelf space and shipping are a considerable cost to publishers, so they would have some motivation to avoid any costs related to the eShop hosting if possible.
Well, what little interest I had in buying as Switch 2 is now totally gone.
