[quote name='arcane93']This is exactly my concern about DLC and downloadable games as a whole. Sure, we'd like to hope they'll still be available when we want them, but will they? How long will any of this content remain available once the next console generation appears? It used to be that if you bought a game, you bought it for life -- I can (and do) still dig out my Atari 2600 or my Super Nintendo and play any of the games that I bought on those consoles. With games now, though -- in even ten years, if it was a downloadable game, forget it; if it was a DLC add-on, forget it.
And even worse, with the advent of consoles with hard drives and internet connections, game developers have become more and more prone to releasing buggy games and relying on patching them, simply because they can. How often do you get a brand new release, only to find that the first thing that you have to do before you can even play it is download an "update" fixing something that the developer didn't get around to before the discs were pressed? Guess what -- in ten years, when you want to pull out that game and run it on your emulator (or your backward-compatible PS4/XBox 720/whatever) because your console has long since died, you'll be running that unpatched, buggy copy, because the patch won't be available to you anymore.
I'm not saying that we should all refuse to buy any downloadable content whatsoever or anything like that, but recent events like this, Activision pulling the MUA DLC because of licensing, and the removal of original XBox content from Live should serve as a wake-up call. We, as consumers, need to start holding the industry accountable for what they're selling to us, and demand a guarantee that the content that we purchase will be available to us for as long as we still want it, in whatever form it takes to make it happen. Otherwise, this hobby that we invest so much of our time and money in becomes a disposable one.[/QUOTE]
What's the problem with downloading it to your hard drive and then leaving it there? Then you would be in the exact same position as you are with physical media: you have a physical copy (which for better or for worse could be damaged and made unplayable) that will still work whenever you choose to drag out this console. But with digital media, you have the additional option of re-downloading it (for the lifetime of the service) should you delete it or damage it. You can't do that if you damage your purchased physical copy. The only difficulty is that the digital media is more difficult for you to resell?
I bring this up because I hear your argument all the time, but I don't remember anyone explaining why this is so different from having purchased a physical copy. I like owning a physical copy, also, but this seems more like a personal preference than a complaint about the entire nature of digital media.