That's one thing I wish Nintendo would have taken into account with their systems and pushing their eshop services so hard recently. Yeah I can download games, but the teeny, tiny storage cards and hard drives on their systems quickly run out of space. I know they say they package with smaller cards so they can charge less, but the sizes of their drives are a bit ridiculous... I wish they could have eaten at least some of the cost of packaging with larger storage devices and saved everyone else a bit of hassle! At least SD cards are fairly inexpensive now.
Capcom was the first to use digital downloads. They originally wanted to cut out the middle-man such as places like GameStop, and also lower costs of games by removing shipping, packaging, manuals, and other such things found in hard copies. They stated they never wanted to sell a game for over $20 if it was digital. It wasn't long before other companies followed their concept but greedily, forcing the rates for the digi market to go up drastically, however, which, in turn, made Capcom go back on their word and raise theirs as well.
For me, I enjoy holding the physical copy of a game. Plus, I know that I own the game. I actually don't mind digital games. I don't own many, mainly because there is barely an incentive to actually buying the digital version. Many of the prices are the same or offer a very meager discount, which isn't worth the additional hard drive space. Until these companies offer digital downloads like Steam, they aren't really cost-effective.
For me, I enjoy holding the physical copy of a game. Plus, I know that I own the game. I actually don't mind digital games. I don't own many, mainly because there is barely an incentive to actually buying the digital version. Many of the prices are the same or offer a very meager discount, which isn't worth the additional hard drive space. Until these companies offer digital downloads like Steam, they aren't really cost-effective.
And that there's a great point. With a Nintendo game (or any game by a big third party that's not on Steam), there's literally zero incentive to buy it in a digital format. Same price for a game you can't do anything interesting with? Is not leaving the house really worth that inconvenience?
What interesting things can you do with a retail copy vs a digital copy??
Well, you have the option to trade it or share it with friends, resell it, they don't take near as much room in the system's data storage, and you don't lose access to it in the case of a system failure. Not to mention the collectability of products and their packaging. A lot of people, including me, really enjoy having something physical to interact with and look at.
But then the downsides are that you have the physical object, and you have to store it and keep track of it. In the 3DS case, the games are TINY, and would be fairly easy to lose if you aren't putting them into a case. The case we have has a sheet in it with lots of little elastic pockets to stick the games in. But I'm also stuck with an entire cabinet on my desk filled with 3DS game cases and various boxes I wanted to keep- the stack of game cases for my DS/3DS games alone is around a foot tall. Physical games do take up a lot of room. And you have to change out the cartridge every time you want to play a new game, versus just pushing a button. so there's the convenience factor there.
Right now, except for the convenience of having the games all on the system and not having to leave your house, there isn't any incentive at all to buy Nintendo games on the eshop. You'd quickly have to upgrade to a much larger micro SD card if you intend to have any of the full 3DS releases. There's little to no cost difference for the digital version, versus the retail that comes with the full packaging and inserts. There's no real account system that offers benefits like Steam does, and because of that I wouldn't trust Nintendo to be able to take care of me in case of a hardware failure or theft. So long as I have the room to store the stuff, and the game is available for retail, I'll mostly be buying my 3DS games at least at a real store, and not on the eshop...
Not having full control over my titles is probably the one reservation I have about digital games, a couple have just disappeared in the past. That said, it seems very uncommon and if it did, I would just buy the disk version then.
