The Los Angeles Times is reporting that Best Buy plans on cutting the amount of space dedicated to actual CDs and DVDs. Instead the plan is to sell via digital downloads. As gamers we are already used to the idea of buying online. Steam, Direct2Drive and Impulse are the big ones. They carry AAA titles as well as some of the more obscure ones, they provide high speeds for downloads, they auto-patch, etc. Additionally you are also told that you don't need to worry about losing or damaging your disks, since you can always re-download.
Personally I have a problem with that. I like owning the actual disks. Every time I open my gigantic and heavy CD binder, flip through it's pages, and look at the images printed on those disks I experience the joy of ownership. In addition to mere materialism, the disks also serve as mnemonic devices to help me recall happy or sad moments I associate with those games. Steam and others are slowly but surely creating a world where this particular aspect of gaming is going to disappear. There is more to it, however, than just the satisfaction of owning tactile objects.
Before I go any further, I must admit that yes, I do have a Steam account. Their sales are good and sometimes games give you no choice but to register there (Dawn of War II). Also I've won a giveaway which was distributed through Steam and participated in a beta test which was also Steam based. I even bought three games from Direct2Drive during their anniversary sale because the prices were good. Of course I immediately burned them onto DVDs and decorated them with LightScribe, but I can't do that with a dozen or so games I own on Steam.
I can't stuff them into my album. If I decide to sail across the world I can't take them with me, because there will be no Internet access. If squirrels chew through the cables outside my house, I won't be able to play. You get the picture. By gaining "freedom" from the physical media, I have now lost much more freedom overall. I will not go into discussing the online activation DRM scheme, but what annoys and scares me is that once Valve, or whoever, is out of business (nothing lasts forever) all my games will be gone.
Yes, I know Valve promised to let people download what they paid for should it ever be in trouble, but I don't believe that for a second. At least not until I can have this promise in legally binding writing. Plenty of services have closed in the past, and whatever people bought through them has disappeared. When a company goes bankrupt, who is going to pay for keeping up the servers so that people can secure their property? Does Valve have an escrow account set up for that? Somehow I doubt it.
The purpose of this article is not to suggest anyone boycott these services, far from it. They definitely are useful and have a lot of redeeming qualities. All I'm asking for is an option to also be sent a DRM-free disk, which I can use to install a game 50 years in the future. I think it's fair to let a person actually hold on to and own something they paid money for.
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