download vs buying cartridge

[Kriven]

I go with whichever is most economical. Surprisingly, that's more often the physical version of a game, as the digital releases don't have as dramatic pricedrops for whatever reason. If both versions are the same price, though, I've lately been preferring the digital copies... for Nintendo games, at least. I notice I play each individual game more if I turn on the device and they're all there looking at me, as opposed to actively recalling my whole list of games and digging through the shelves for a specific title... I don't want anybody to think this is a laziness thing either, it's just that when I dive into my shelves the first thing on my mind is a game I already love, and I have a lot of games that I haven't even played because of that, whereas I've tried everything I've downloaded at least once.

The other thing to consider is tangible space. Right now I occupy a very small room, more of a closet really, and space is a big consideration for me. The fact that most apartments really aren't much bigger than where I'm living now, and the fact that girlfriend has a fairly large toy collection to consider, it means that living space is becoming a bit of a priority. I really don't mind all that much since movies and music have already been, for the most part, digitized for quite some time. And of course, I still make room for things which are not digitally available. As long as I remember to keep everything backed up, I shouldn't have much of an issue with future incompatibility as far as I know.

Maybe this will all come back to bite me, but I feel like some consumer-friendly policies are going to be taken throughout the industry over the next few years as publishers try more to convince their customers to go digital. Really the only thing I worry about is theft, because I don't want to go to the trouble of filing a police report just so Nintendo will trust me enough to put my games on a new device... but the more I think about it, the more I realize they wouldn't send me replacement discs in the incident of theft, and they wouldn't be expected to. It's become much less of an issue to me.