Agree. With physical games I know what I own and know that they will be there whenever I want. No one can take them, or remove acces to them.
There are examples of games being removed from the iOS app store like Bioshock and Ghost Trick. Silent Hills was removed from PSN and I'd guess there will be more, not to mention that the entire PSN store will likely be taken down at some point. In the end if I own Physical copies I'm not dependent on anyone/anything else. They can be resold, played, etc... whenever I want.
IOS is riddled with problems --
-the iterative hardware means games you own may get updated to versions that no longer run on your hardware
-games get taken down can no longer be downloaded, etc.
PSN does not have those issues, and if anything, Sony has shown their quite good about stuff--
-you can still download stuff taken down from the store, etc
-they rarely ban accounts, and certainly not for mistakes they made (ie, you can take advantage of price glitches without fear).
I assume by 'Silent Hill' you mean P.T.... nobody bought that. It is a rare case where Konami, having never sold it, likely had the power to take it completely off the store and servers. That isn't done if money is exchanged.
The difference is that in the case of losing a physical disc, there are still other physical discs out there. It's replaceable. When a digital exclusive game goes away, if it hasn't been released on another platform, it's just completely gone. (Yes, of course the pirates will find a way, but by that logic, let's all just stop buying games in the first place.)
This all the way. It is simply unrealistic to expect publishers to maintain those servers in perpetuity. A fire in your home is pretty unlikely, but the servers going away is completely assured. It will happen.
Forever? Yeah, sure, you're probably right. But I'd be surprised if they take them down in my lifetime. The servers in question are basically just file servers -- fairly simple in the scheme of things. You request a file, they serve the file to you.
Additionally, those servers have current reasons to exist -- games are still selling. The PS5 will still need to deliver games.
There's just no reason to take down those servers in the foreseeable future, and most definitely no reason to remove older games. It would be industry suicide, for example, to remove psp and ps3 games from their servers. Why? There's no upside to it.
Now, at some point some storefronts might become too expensive to maintain -- that's why they stopped supporting the psp storefront. But they provided logical alternatives -- you can still buy the games on the web, and they converted the store to a download list so you can still access said games. That's a perfectly serviceable solution.
Even if Sony came up such hard times that they were bankrupted, PSN is a profitable service that would almost certainly be bought and maintained in the fire sale.
Digital doesn't take up space, I don't like owning too many things I'm not using, and it's super convenient. I'll take that, even with the added 'risk' of losing access which I don't really think is at all likely, anyday. I can understand why the lack of cases/etc bothers some -- I used to have a massive vinyl collection and mps3s do -not- do it for me... but it's not because I"m worried mps3 will suddenly go away... I just liked the 'feel' of vinyl. But for those of us that don't need the 'feel' of physical games, digital is a perfectly safe alternative and for most of us, by the time any chance of the servers going down occurs (30 years? 40 years? never?) we'll be playing something else.
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Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters today at GS for $18 since it was the only store that had it by me. The rest were 30 or more miles away.
