I never thought I would want to go digital.

In fact, I still buy most of my music on CD since it’s so easy to rip them to mp3s, and I don’t ever have to worry about backing up my digital music collection.

You know, for when that massive EMP hits and erases all our hard drives? Hopefully it doesn’t effect the circuits of our CD players too… which could be a problem now that I think about it? But I digress.

So here I was, happily buying everything on physical media, then Steam happened.

By that I mean awesome Steam sales with great games wicked cheap happened!

Or more accurately put, classic PC games for pennies on the dollar each time a Steam sale rolls around.

At first, it was all about the sale for me (hey, I’m frugal!)

But as time when on, it became more about the convenience of having access to my games library from anywhere at anytime.

No more digging through old boxes in the attic, or worrying about scratched CDs, or whether or not needed patches were still available online.

So then the XBOX ONE comes out and I’m thinking hey, why don’t I just go all digital there too?

This point was driven home when I was out of town visiting a friend and realized I had forgot the game disc we had planned on playing (thank you Red Box for saving the weekend!)

Then comes the fall releases and the other shoe drops (actually more like kicks me) – To go digital is going to be expensive!

Why?!?!?!?

So, for some reason Amazon, Best Buy, and others can give you a 5%-20% discount on the physical copy of a new release AND ship it to you for free AND have it to you the morning of the release.

BUT they offer no discounts on what has to be the extremely less expensive to handle online digital code.

Yes, you heard that right. They give you a good discount on the item they physically stock and ship, but the little jpeg picture of a digital code is sold at list price.

But wait, there’s more.

For the convenience of going digital, not only do you get to pay full list price, you also lose the ability to return a defective game because their is nothing to return. The one exception may be if you purchased it directly from the console’s store, but even those refunds seem to be rare.

And obviously you also lose any opportunity to trade the game in if it was something you just didn’t care for, or tired of it quickly.

So while going digital does make sense when you find good old games deeply discounted, for new games it seems like it’s too expensive and has little upside.

Well, at lease that’s what I think. Feel free to share what you think below.

Oh, and if you know of any EMP proof CD player enclosures please post those as well,

Until next time, ~PEACE~

Grey