Regrets about switching to all digital/almost all digital?

[dsheinem]

And then the classic one anyone has suffered in some form. You buy a game, you lose access to game, you just lost your money. Did your system die and it was account bound (cough Nintendo?) How about licensing slap fights where a game gets removed from the company storage so if you reinstall it's gone? How about accidentally (or not) violating some TOS or perceived so, and a company just erases your stuff in spite due to the rules...they just erased your money. There's lots of reasons which all tie back to owning something, then having it stolen out from under you for whatever reason because it's not a physical object.

This was, to some extent, my line of thinking on this issue...but I am starting to think that the risk of having digital goods tied to an account that may or may not eventually create ownership problems is not dramatically different than the idea that you run a risk that your physical games could be damaged in a flood/fire/etc, stolen in a break-in, develop bit rot or other physical problems, etc.

With movies and music my big thing is sound fidelity: I can hear/see the difference between a Blu-Ray and a Netflix stream and hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. The question: do I care enough to hold on to the physical stuff? I am, for example, thinking it may be worth parting out my CD collection and reinvesting the money I get from it into a decent vinyl collection of favorite albums instead. I dunno.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I have more than 2000 physical games...maybe more than 3000...I am still trying to find at least 1100 more...

[noiseredux]

tl;dr: I basically get the cheapest/most convenient version of a thing I want be it digital or physical. There are some special things I'll want physical copies of (Sonic Youth CD's for instance). But for the most part, not collecting stuff feels awesome and liberating and only buying stuff that I want to utilize immediately has saved me a lot of money.

[Exhuminator]

I haven't bought movies or music as optical based media since circa 2008. No regrets there. I rarely watch movies more than once, so no point in owning something I can just stream the one time and be done with it. I'd rather have music digitally for portable device playing, I don't think I need to explain the pros of that. Books I'm 50/50 on. If it's a new common book I don't mind a digital format like PDF. If it's a rare old book I prefer to have a real copy of it because DAT SMELL. It's a fetish, don't judge. (Plus I get a kick out of reading ancient yellowed and beat up sci-fi books talking about futures that still haven't happened yet.)

All that said, games are their own thing. I always buy games physically if possible. There are a few reasons why, but the most important is resale. Games on average cost a lot more than books, movies, or music, so being able to recoup some of my investment on those is important to me. Also games are often linked to proprietary platforms which makes simply pirating/emulating them more complicated than other media... it's often easier to just play the legit real thing if it's sixth gen or above.

One last thought though while we're on the subject of emulation. At the turn of the century I got rid of all my 8 and 16 bit stuff, because I chose emulation for those gens. I've never regretted it. The emulation for 8 and 16 bit stuff is spot on great, and has been for a long assed time. I can feel your hate bros and I bathe in it.

[ejamer]

Still big on physical for books and games.
Music is best digital, and video is all streamed.

Because I do a lot of Nintendo gaming, digital is generally horrible. They have a terrible account system that ties purchases to hardware and makes transferring a pain. Forwards compatibility is a huge issue also. Honestly I have no idea why people think this is a good idea.

That said, I own two PSP Go consoles and a PSTV. Sony's pricing and support for digital is generally much better - enough so that I'm content with the risk attached of content being unavailable in the future. No regrets on that end yet - but my purchases are limited by available (ie: affordable) storage space.

[prfsnl_gmr]

I can feel your hate bros and I bathe in it.

Nope. You are absolutely right. (I actually end up playing a lot of the games I own on emulators because they offer a better experience.) I just like having lots of old carts around, and I enjoy looking for them at video game stores, flea markets, pawn shops, etc. (Again, collecting video games and playing video games are related, but nonetheless distinct, hobbies.)

With regard to books, I usually just buy paper copies - typically used - and then pass them on when I am done with them. Like Exhuminator, however, I enjoy keeping some books around, and I dream of having a shelf full of pulpy crime novels in a beach or lake house someday. You know, the ones that look like this:

They are too cool.

With regard to music, my wife and I own a lot of CDs (that we bought new...in the '90s). We ripped all of them and listen to our music through our iPods. We keep the actual CDS in binders...in our attic. (We typically trash the cases.) They don't take up much space, and - technically - if we get rid of the CDs, we should also delete our copies of them (which would be a pain). If we do get some new music, it is usually because we found a cool CD for $1 or $2 at a thrift store or yard sale. (We then rip the CD, and throw it in the binder.) Sometimes we buy music digitally, but I find that, for popular music at least, it is often cheaper to get a physical copy. (The same is often true for recent video games...)

I also have some DVDs and Blu-Rays, but I am pretty selective about what I keep. (At local pawn shops, DVDs are $1 and Blu-Rays are $3...so...again...It is often cheaper for me to buy a physical copy of a movie than it is for me to rent it digitally.) When I am done with a movie, I pass it on to my friends and neighbors. Most of the movies I watch nowadays, however, I watch through streaming services.

[Exhuminator]

I dream of having a shelf full of pulpy crime novels in a beach or lake house someday.

This is a good dream.

Off topic kinda... but surprisingly enough old books can be a good investment. I've got some really old (I mean over a hundred years old) spiritualism books worth hundreds of dollars a piece. I don't own a single game worth that much. But who knows what Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters might be worth in a hundred years.

[Tanooki]

This was, to some extent, my line of thinking on this issue...but I am starting to think that the risk of having digital goods tied to an account that may or may not eventually create ownership problems is not dramatically different than the idea that you run a risk that your physical games could be damaged in a flood/fire/etc, stolen in a break-in, develop bit rot or other physical problems, etc.

With movies and music my big thing is sound fidelity: I can hear/see the difference between a Blu-Ray and a Netflix stream and hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. The question: do I care enough to hold on to the physical stuff? I am, for example, thinking it may be worth parting out my CD collection and reinvesting the money I get from it into a decent vinyl collection of favorite albums instead. I dunno.

Yeah but acts of god can be replaced now or 20 years 30 years out, can a digital download if the company bellies up or chooses to bury it short of warez, nope. And I agree on the movie music streaming, it's obvious if you're not tied to a very solid wifi presence and even then some could hear/see it. I still buy games, I buy CDs (and MP3 them), but books I have a kindle and they cost me $1-3 so I don't care it's so cheap. And manga, that I buy as I'm not a fan of the crappy scans out there and they don't display nicely on a kindle at times either due to the small print meant for it. Digital manga they overcharge for with no discount off physical which sucks so I avoid it and it's limited.

[isiolia]

With regard to music, my wife and I own a lot of CDs (that we bought new...in the '90s). We ripped all of them and listen to our music through our iPods. We keep the actual CDS in binders...in our attic. (We typically trash the cases.) They don't take up much space, and - technically - if we get rid of the CDs, we should also delete our copies of them (which would be a pain). If we do get some new music, it is usually because we found a cool CD for $1 or $2 at a thrift store or yard sale. (We then rip the CD, and throw it in the binder.) Sometimes we buy music digitally, but I find that, for popular music at least, it is often cheaper to get a physical copy. (The same is often true for recent video games...)

I still try to buy CDs when reasonable (and many are dirt cheap now), even though I basically do the same. I rip to MP3 and FLAC, put the CD back in the case, and then store it (mine are just piled in on the bottom shelves of a couple bookcases). Binders could be done if I needed to, but I prefer to keep cases intact.
However, like you said, you can potentially make disc based media take up fairly little space. Probably still enough to be troublesome for studio apartments or folks that move a lot...but for a house? Meh. Personally, I'd rather just find a place to stash 'em than purge for pennies on the dollar.

Just in general, it seems like - for some - that side of going digital can be just as well accomplished by choosing not to display those collections. I've taken my DVDs out of the living room, for instance, though I still have them shelved in my game room.

'course, I often wind up watching movies with friends, loaning out discs, that kind of thing. Part of why I like building libraries of stuff is to have it to share.

Video games tend to be the more logical thing to "downsize", if only because far more of them actually have any kind of value. I'm sure some of my CDs/DVDs/etc might be worth more than a buck or two, but not many.
I've only really gone for digital on PC, and even then I like buying physical...it's just often fairly pointless outside of nice bonus materials, since so much is essentially just a code and a download cache anyway.

[marurun]

With movies and music my big thing is sound fidelity: I can hear/see the difference between a Blu-Ray and a Netflix stream and hear the difference between a CD and an MP3. The question: do I care enough to hold on to the physical stuff? I am, for example, thinking it may be worth parting out my CD collection and reinvesting the money I get from it into a decent vinyl collection of favorite albums instead. I dunno.

Cable TV these days is even worse than Netflix.

But to the music end of this, if you own the CD, you can encode your own MP3 files in a particular configuration good enough you don't have to hear the difference (repeated AB testing has confirmed that properly encoded MP3s [and not even at max quality settings] are not able to be reliably distinguished from CD originals by even those who claim to be able to reliably tell the difference).