Something I've been thinking about as it relates to fighting games and buying them physically.

[PopetherevXXVIII]

Not only am I not buying fighting games physically anymore, Unless it has Denuvo I'm buying them on Steam.

I don't mind season passes for fighting games so long as they are priced reasonably. I'm from the era when adding even the smallest thing means buying the game all over again at full price. MAYBE you'd get a discounted upgrade kit if you ran an arcade but that's pretty much the old way. So $20-30 season passes I'm fine with. But this also makes buying fighting games physically completely pointless. It's also a nightmare for people on the preservation side of things. Unless there's some weirdo out there that has the installer files for every single fighting game with a Season pass on a hard drive somewhere. 10 years from now you think we'll be able to play Street Fighter V before they added the second V skill and V shift? Yeah if we're playing the barebones first version limited to the PS4 disc but not the version with a fuller roster and arcade mode.

The average person doesn't care about this stuff, and honestly neither do the companies that make these games. But I like going back to older versions and seeing how a fighting game evolved over time. We're either getting gold code or the final game IF WE ARE LUCKY.

This applies to any competitive game but as somebody who loves fighting games and more than half of my physical game collection is fighters It's something I've been thinking about.

 

[dark]

I agree in principle. These days if a company does a digital release, and then comes out with patches or updates, their intention is to get every user updated.

Maybe its just my steam settings, but my steam games don't automatically update themselves, I just get notified that there is an update in case I want to download it and update my game to the latest version. The saving grace might be that there are plenty of lazy people like me who don't automatically update all their games, so that 5-10 years from now, the files for that game on my HDD might still be an older version that can be contributed to an archive.

Another saving grace is that there are definitely pirates and release groups out there who still pirate and release modern digital download pc games, and there is still an incentive by the release groups to release things as quickly as possible. That means that at least initially, the base versions of these games float around in the pirate areas, increasing the chances that down the line some archivest/pirate will have the "scene release" version of the base game on a HDD to contribute to an archive.

 

[la-li-lu-le-lo]

I don’t understand how the thing you’re talking about is related to buying physical copies of games. If you buy a physical copy of a game and they release updates or DLC for it, you can still download that stuff - there’s no difference at all between doing that and buying the earlier digital version, except that you have a physical copy. Personally, I sometimes buy a PS4 physical version of a game and the Steam version - because I want a physical copy, but I also want the Steam version so I can play the game at a higher resolution (1440p instead of 1080p in some cases). From my perspective, the higher resolution is the only advantage of owning it on Steam.

 

[TreblaYevrah]

I think this has been the reality of gaming in general for a long time now. PC ditched physical releases a long time ago (one of my biggest gripes with the Steam platform), but consoles have been slower to abandon it completely. It's definitely not unique to fighting games, as basically every game at least has a significant day one patch that adds some degree of functionality or cleans things up. I bought quite a few games physically for PS4, and I enjoy playing the games from disc with no updates to see how incomplete they are (sadistic, I know). Some are worse than others for sure, but I've come across a few that are basically prototypes without their day one patch. Even for consoles, it's getting closer to the point of basically having a Steam code in a box.

I've been gaming for a long time, so I'm not bitter about it really, but it is one of the things that has made me pretty disinterested in the newer generations. I can fully understand that generally digital makes more sense from a business standpoint... and technically I guess it's less wasteful if we want to really split hairs... but I'll always be more of a physical collector, so the older consoles or bygone days of PC are more my speed/interest.

The one thing I will say for sure is that if gaming is to go entirely digital (which I think it will) then there is no justification for a digital game to cost the same as a physical copy. A packaged game burned to a disc in a store that is $79.99 still being that price on the Playstation Network is completely unacceptable, really. A book that typically cost $17 is usually around $5 if you buy the ebook version, because nothing had to be printed or distributed. Gaming should be no different.