One reason is control. You control the physical media. You can sell it, you can buy used games, let people borrow them, etc.

This affects less people, but there are also many who like collecting them. Physical objects are nice, especially if you've been keeping all your old games for old consoles.

Which also ties into control of course: you can still play your games, even if the companies that made them and the console no longer exist, buy old games from retro shops, buy new games for old consoles from new indie devs, etc.

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0x457 a day ago | parent [-]

> One reason is control. You control the physical media. You can sell it, you can buy used games, etc.

Unless that game ties to your account and disc becomes useless, or you game need a day 1 patch or day 412 patch or game is online or disc actually just a dummy that lets you download the game. Yes, the (in)convince of physical media totally worth it just so can sell what I got for $40/60/70 for $4 store credit at gamestop. All to have less control than I have from digital download from steam or GOG on PC.

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garciansmith a day ago | parent [-]

Games that require an online account, whether physical or not, are all bad, yes.

But a lot of games are playable just fine without any patches, and there are plenty of physical releases, especially of indie games, which come out after the digital release and include all the patches. And putting aside the nice aspect of owning a physical object (often with cool things like a manual or map in the past and still true with many indie releases now) you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free, and even then you need to keep back up copies because the service you downloaded it from might disappear.

	▲	0x457 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Booklets and maps are thing of the past. If you want more than a disc in a box you have to buy collectors edition that been a thing for the last decade, probably. Indie games rarely come out on physical media. If you want a physical object for the sake of having a physical object - buy/print cases and print covers. Alternatively, get into vinyl, those at least can be presented as wall art. > you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free Again, with consoles you don't have control over physical discs/cartridges either. Nothing stops Sony and MS follow Nintendo. You can only "own" something if it's fully offline and DRM-free (be it officially DRM-free or liberated by nice people)