Not an issue for me. The only MP games I play regularly (Halo and Mario Kart) are also games my friends have as well. And even if they didn't, having to bring over a disc (or even my system) for a LAN or whatever was never a hassle to me. Seriously, though, when did you ever feel the need to bring your whole collection over to a friend's house?

: Having the games I purchased in other countries STILL work here in the US, I
: still have a physical US Copy of Mirror's Edge that I haven't played
: because it won't work on my UK 360. I don't have that issue with any of my
: Digital purchases

Not an issue for me. All my stuff is U.S. standard. I don't import and have no plans to ever move away from the U.S. I imagine your situation is rather uncommon.

: I hate wanting to play something different and having to get up, if it's an
: option to be able to switch quickly from Destiny to MCC, then I want it.
: Heck I love being able to switch from playing Destiny on my XB1 to playing
: Rocket League on my PS4 in seconds, not minutes, while we all try to find
: which box our RL disc is in

I have muscular dystrophy. Just moving around is painful and exhausting much of the time. I still get up and down to switch discs. Takes me all of 30-40 seconds. It helps that all my stuff is centralized in my room. My consoles are only six feet from where I sit and my games are all on a rack within arm's reach. Still, I've gotten so accustomed to having to swap out games that it just never was a big deal to me. You gotta get up to eat, use the bathroom, or leave the house, so what's the big hassle over having to swap discs?

: I don't ACTUALLY like going to midnight releases or having to physically go
: to a store to buy something that is inherently digital, that we have
: turned a digital good into a physical good is a very interesting concept
: that's getting discussed here. I'm just excited that when I wake up Oct
: 27th, I'll have Halo 5 ready to play (yes, I have 1gb down fiber, and yes
: nothing is actually wired, so it's more like 400mb down...)
:

About the only thing I do midnight launches for is Halo (Gears 2, BioShock Infinite, & Destiny are the only non-Halo games I preordered to get at the midnight launch). It's actually more expedient for me to drive to GameStop or Wal-mart than it is to download anything. I have good internet speed and yet it would take at least 4-5 hours to download a 50GB game, yet it takes me only 10 minutes to drive to the store.

In short, nothing about digital has come across as being more easy or convenient than physical. Not only is the supposed convenience of digital illusory, it doesn't trump what you give up by switching. In U.S. jurisprudence at least, you don't own digital copies; they're treated as "licensed, not sold" and thus first-sale rights do not apply. Meanwhile, the law states that I actually own my physical copies and can dispose of them like I could any other durable good that I own. I can sell, lend, or gift them at my own discretion without the permission of the copyright holder; the only thing I can't do is create and distribute new copies. Basically, with digital you own nothing. You have no rights. You paid for a temporary license that could potentially be revoked for any reason or no reason at all at a moment's notice. Almost as if to demonstrate who owns what, there have been several occasions where individual titles and even entire libraries of content have been wiped from peoples hard drives or devices "for reasons." Furthermore, even if a copyright holder or publisher allows some limited forms of sharing of digital copies, they are doing so only as a courtesy. They have no legal obligation to allow you to do so and can rescind that privilege at their discretion. Digital copies are basically glorified rentals with an indeterminate due-back date.

Additionally, physical has the edge with long-term availability in most cases. The accompanying second-hand market ensures that, at least in principle, most titles should remain readily available long after they have gone out of print. There have been many older games that were long out of print, yet either took a very long time to be released digitally or haven't been released digitally yet, but they could still be bought second-hand. There are still a great many old-school games from the 80s & 90s that have never been released either digitally or as part of a compilation for newer systems, yet with a quick search on Amazon or eBay and you can probably find those old treasures. Granted, prices and availability can vary considerably based on supply & demand (rarer games often cost more), but still, the option to buy the old game (and the necessary hardware if you no longer have it) is still on the table.

With digital, once something is delisted from a digital storefront (the digital equivalent of going out of print) it is simply no longer avaialable for purchase until it gets relisted (if it gets relisted). This has happened many times. After Nickelodeon bought all the rights to TMNT, every TMNT game offered digitally (including TMNT The Arcade Game on XBLA, which had never been offered outside the arcades before) was delisted from every digital storefront. Irem later had most if not all the R-Type games pulled from whatever services they were being offered on once they decided video games were no longer to be part of their business. Nintendo has lost the rights to distribute several games over the Virtual Console (including the aforementioned NES TMNT game) and have even delisted some of their own games for some inexplicable reason. If you lose your copies of those games for whatever reason (the file is corrupted, the hard drive fails) you may be unable to re-download them.

Furthermore, I simply do not trust digital copies to last as long as physical copies. Properly maintained, a cartridge or optical disc will last you a lifetime. Meanwhile, hard drives don't last nearly as long. Based on some studies, there's serious doubts that the average console's HDD will last you 20+ years with regular use. Forget about games delisted when a system is still being supported. Once a console is no longer supported and its services are no longer around (and that's almost certainly going to include "cloud" support), good luck with being able to re-download any of your digital games. You're probably shit outta luck. But I can still go on Amazon or eBay or drive to 2nd & Charles or wherever and still be able to find copies of those games.

We've already seen this with the original Xbox. Tell me, have you tried redownloading the Halo 2 map packs lately? I did several years ago because I was planning a LAN, but since support for the OXbox and its games was phased out my only alternative was to find a copy of the Multiplayer Map Pack disc. The Wii, 360, and PS3 won't be supported forever, either, and will likely end up like the OXbox by the end of this decade or early next decade. The same fate will befall the PS4, XBO, and Wii U, and one day their successors, and so on for as long as consoles remain a thing. My old 80s & 90s consoles and their games still work fine to this day. No worries about hard drive failures or lack of continued support from the manufacturer. I have a feeling that digital is going to make the future of retro gaming very hard, and only those who invested in physical will be able to partake in the second-hand market once currently-supported consoles are as old as the NES or SNES are now.

So, I'm pretty much done with digital, and I never really invested heavily in it in the first place. I've maybe spent about $50-60 on digital copies in the past decade, vs. thousands on physical copies. The last digital titles I actually bought were Mega Man 10 and Perfect Dark HD, and that was 5-½ years ago. The only digital copies I've obtained since then were free, either as part of some digital promo (which is how I got Pikmin 3 on the Wii U) or part of the free monthly games offered through PS+. But if I'm going to invest $60 on a title, it's going to be a physical copy. I'm just glad at least some indie games are starting to get physical releases, because I've avoided buying them because of my aversion to digital.

My main concern is that there's actually demand for digital, because that affects me. Fortunately physical remains dominant on consoles (for retail-release titles, physical outsold digital in the U.S. last year by a nearly 18-to-1 ratio) and shows no signs of abating in its dominance, and thus an all-digital console simply can't succeed in the current market and may remain nonviable for a long, long time. But if, if, demand for physical gets low enough one day for consoles to simply go all-digital, I'm no longer supporting the gaming industry. I'll have lost part of something that has been a major part of my life, and I'll blame it squarely on those who invested in a product they don't even own and thus voluntarily forfeited their first-sale rights as well as any guaranteed prospects of enjoying their purchases for decades to come because they didn't want to get up to change discs or whatever.

Sorry for the drawn-out rant, but, yes, this really is serious business to me. I've been playing video games for 30+ years and I view digital not as an option, but as a threat to a system of consumption that has remained unchanged since consoles have been a thing. I don't view "physical vs. digital" as a "to each their own" thing. From my point of view, if someone invests in digital, they're supporting a bad business model. Period. I view it the same way many view other ostensibly bad business practices like "on-disc DLC" or online passes. And the older I get, the more digital seems like a raw deal. Until such a point as the laws change and online services guaranteed to be around forever, there's absolutely nothing that will change my mind on the subject.