Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Games Go Digital



     Digital downloads have made new and old games easier than ever to play. No standing in line to wait for the midnight release of the latest Call of Duty, no worrying if your local game store has a copy of Ocarina of Time; digital downloads have opened the industry up in a lot of ways; any game you want, any time you want (taking into account download times), and sometimes, for way cheaper than you can get anywhere else. There are, however, a few downsides to digital-only gaming, the biggest, most noticeable one is limited storage space. Both new consoles only come with 500gb of storage, which, as of late, seems to consist of about 10 AAA games (realistically, depending on the games, could last years, but hey, who ONLY plays AAA titles...) Though, they both let you upgrade to larger HDD's, there will never be enough space. The other problem is licenses. Digital stores like Steam only sell you the license of the game, so they can take away that license regardless you paying or not. We saw Rockstar do this with GTAV and "cheaters", on man reported that he had been using mods offline, then got banned, and had his game license revoked, so he couldn't play the game he had purchased. He wouldn't have hit this snag had he bought a disc based version of the game. Another revoking we've seen is the P.T demo from the PSN Store: after the cancellation of Silent Hills, Konami pulled the demo from the store, and if you hadn't had it downloaded onto your PS4, you wouldn't be able to get it at all. The fact that game publishers can take away your rights to play their game is very bad, regardless the game being free or being $60.

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