LogFAQs > #971618232

Dikitain posted...

This, if anything, digital has made games more available then they ever where.

Not saying I don't lust for the days that physical wasn't a dying medium, but I also am glad I don't have to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a game anymore because it wasn't popular.

Yeah, there are ups and downs to it. On one hand, when a digital game is removed from storefronts, it actually becomes impossible to find it (legally), as opposed to just difficult/expensive, and that's really bad from an art preservation standpoint. On the other, though, digital games tend to remain available in stores for much longer than physical ones by simple virtue of not having to compete for limited shelf space. That's really good from the standpoint of just wanting to play them, especially if you're hoping to wait for a sale (which, with physical, means finding a sweet spot between the game being cheap enough that you want to buy it but not so cheap that it's no longer worth stocking it over something more valuable). If I want, I can load up Steam right now and buy a copy of Knights of the Old Republic (for example), 20 years after it was released. Finding a physical copy, however, would have been hard within 5 and is all but impossible now.

That's also without considering how many games simply wouldn't exist if not for digital distribution. Yes, it sucks that there are hundreds of games that will simply disappear from the market when the eShop shuts down next month, but the fact of the matter is that those games would never have made it onto store shelves in the first place if releasing physically were their only option. I would rather see those games be sold for a few years than not at all. Digital distribution has been an incalculable boon for the indie market, which I consider to be a good thing overall.

Now, saying that, there's really no excuse for shutting down the eShop except to restrict access to older titles that might have remasters or ports coming (driving up demand - and therefore profit - for those). I'm more forgiving of it in the case of the Wii and other examples of early digital distribution, while companies were still figuring out the whole process, but there's absolutely zero reason the 3DS, WiiU, and Switch can't all use the same shop service hosted on common servers that never need to be taken out of service. They already use the same account/wallet and you can use a PC to browse and make purchases in all three shops, so clearly their segregation isn't a technical issue so much as a deliberate decision to host them separately, and that makes these shutdowns really frustrating.

Of course, I see absolutely nothing wrong with pirating games that nobody sells, so there's always that as a plan B.