- Joined
- Mar 10, 2025
- Messages
- 251
- Level up in
- 249 posts
- Reaction score
- 405
- Points
- 1,977
- Location
- Macedonia
This is a topic I've been discussing for years now but with the recent Sony announcement that they're going to up and stop producing physical discs, I figured I'd post about it here too. Made a 45 min video on the subject as well but who is going to watch that.
Sure, the usual issues of lack of ownership, losing all your digital purchases over an unfair ban and everything are still huge problems, downright vile stuff.
But people rarely discuss how Digital actually hurts game exposure too.
1. How Digital hurts both Gamers and Developers
- Digital Storefronts are flooded with all kinds of games, discounts, promotions. Honestly, to the average person this is all just noise, it all blends together and they forego exploration in favor of just buying the few popular things they know.
- Although there is a definitive shift in tastes and interests, there's still people who care about and want to play Arcade style games for example. Yet we have absolutely abysmal stats on many such games over at that Steam Charts/Steamdb site.
This shows me that game discovery is at an all time low on digital stores.
We have millions upon millions of Steam users and to have stats like this, no, just not ok in my book.
So both developers and gamers end up negatively affected here.
Quality games are being overlooked or flat out ignored, gamers miss out on games that they might have enjoyed but never discovered, developers have their hard work and genuinely high quality games ignored. On top of everything, corporate cand ecide to delist any game at any time for any reason, it's just nuts.
2. Physical Stores and the human connection they provide were actually better for Exposure
You go to a store to buy or rent a game, you get exposted to a TON of games. Someone there might be playing a game, you want to try it out. The clerk or other customers might share some gaming knowlerdge with you, you end up full of new experiences right then and there.
Watching a trailer on a digital storefront isn't the same as seeing a game being played in real life right there in front of youy. Just the angle at which you are watching this someone play the game at the store or at the arcade back in the day was enough to make your brain want to try it out for yourself too, see and experience the game from your own first person perspective, from your own angle. These are feelings, emotions and desires I’ve been exploring and have been aware for decades now. This experience is vastly different from just seeing a flat gameplay video or trailer on screen at a digital store.
If you went to the store to rent a game, you're already thinking about all the other games you saw there and what to rent out next weekend.
And while digital stores might seem easier to access, they're not as simple as walking into a store and experiencing games there first hand.
Even in my part of the world we had EVERYTHING in physical stores back in the day, thanks to bootlegs and piracy. And those pirated games worked just as normal games did anyway, they had the full game on the disc or cart and everything.
So kids in my country had a much easier access to gaming in the 90's than they do now to digital stores in 2026.
3. Digital Stores aren't as easily accessible to everyone.
- Regional differences, countries not being supported by Sony, MS and Nintendo.
It's all one big mess. It's downright wishful thinking to expect a country like Macedonia would ever get support from Sony for their PSN Store.
- The average person, especially in my part of the world still struggles with Digital Store access, setting up accounts, buying pre-paid gift/digital code cards for stores that don't support our region and even when they do support our country like Steam, it's too much for people to handle. Thankfully we have an abudnance of generic, but still used physical games here so the average normie can feed their GTA and FIFA Addiction all they want with used physical games or new ones if they so desire.
4. People would rather buy digital games here from shady folk who resell accounts than set up their own.
- I can’t count the number of times I see people asking for help on Macedonian gaming facebook groups about how to buy digitally from the PS Store, even how to set up an account. Buying games from these stores is especially complex for people since to do so you have to go jump through a bunch of hoops because Macedonia is not and never will be a supported country by Sony or Nintendo.
I can’t count the number of times parents my age have, people in their 40\s contacted me asking me to explain how to navigate these strange online stores on their kids Playstation or Switch, how to buy games if it’s even possible from Macedonia and so on.
Even when you explain everything carefully, these people often remain confused and opt for someone else to sort all this out for them, set up accounts and buy the game for them, someone who “understands” as they often say. That or something else you may have never heard of before, something far more weird and scammy and no I don’t mean piracy, we will discuss just what this is, in a bit.
You see, even when the store does support a country like Macedonia, there’s still hurdles that need to be bypassed, take Steam for example. It requires email registration, you need to deal with credit cards or paypal. These are things that a kid can’t just jump into and do on their own and many parents, my age, still find very confusing and uncomfortable to use.
Even EPIC’s free games don’t do much to help kids nowadays explore gaming because as I said, someone probably just set up their Fortnite and account for them. And since Fortnite is all they know and care about, game discovery ends there.
I speak from experience, because for every person who understands these things there are 50 who do not or aren’t even willing to learn.
This gave the raise to digital resellers, people who profit off of selling singular games, tied to a singular shared account to ignorant people.
These people would rather buy from a local guy who provides them with login instructions for the "game" than to buy their own game on their own account.
This does not help exposure, not one bit as they still only buy what's popular and don't do any kind of exploration themselves.
5. Not even DIGITAL PIRACY helps exposure the way Physical Piracy did back in the day.
I already mentioned that we had absolutely everything gaming in my country during the 90's and early 2000's, pirated, sure, but we had everything in huge stores, chuck full of physical games. Nowadays people who opt for piracy here just buy external HDDs for PS3 and PS4 full of games by resellers who charge per game on the thing.
But here's the thing, they barely explore any of the games on these HDDs, they just play GTA and FIFA or some popular AAA title all while still COMPLAINING how they miss the arcade games of the past, effectively ignoring any and all modern arcade games, beat em ups and so on.
At a physical store tho, when you'd get into a conversation about something like this with another customer, you could ask the clerks to try a game or few out, so you'd be able to show them some cool games right then and there. That's how I myself discovered some of my favorites growing up.
Sure, the usual issues of lack of ownership, losing all your digital purchases over an unfair ban and everything are still huge problems, downright vile stuff.
But people rarely discuss how Digital actually hurts game exposure too.
1. How Digital hurts both Gamers and Developers
- Digital Storefronts are flooded with all kinds of games, discounts, promotions. Honestly, to the average person this is all just noise, it all blends together and they forego exploration in favor of just buying the few popular things they know.
- Although there is a definitive shift in tastes and interests, there's still people who care about and want to play Arcade style games for example. Yet we have absolutely abysmal stats on many such games over at that Steam Charts/Steamdb site.
This shows me that game discovery is at an all time low on digital stores.
We have millions upon millions of Steam users and to have stats like this, no, just not ok in my book.
So both developers and gamers end up negatively affected here.
Quality games are being overlooked or flat out ignored, gamers miss out on games that they might have enjoyed but never discovered, developers have their hard work and genuinely high quality games ignored. On top of everything, corporate cand ecide to delist any game at any time for any reason, it's just nuts.
2. Physical Stores and the human connection they provide were actually better for Exposure
You go to a store to buy or rent a game, you get exposted to a TON of games. Someone there might be playing a game, you want to try it out. The clerk or other customers might share some gaming knowlerdge with you, you end up full of new experiences right then and there.
Watching a trailer on a digital storefront isn't the same as seeing a game being played in real life right there in front of youy. Just the angle at which you are watching this someone play the game at the store or at the arcade back in the day was enough to make your brain want to try it out for yourself too, see and experience the game from your own first person perspective, from your own angle. These are feelings, emotions and desires I’ve been exploring and have been aware for decades now. This experience is vastly different from just seeing a flat gameplay video or trailer on screen at a digital store.
If you went to the store to rent a game, you're already thinking about all the other games you saw there and what to rent out next weekend.
And while digital stores might seem easier to access, they're not as simple as walking into a store and experiencing games there first hand.
Even in my part of the world we had EVERYTHING in physical stores back in the day, thanks to bootlegs and piracy. And those pirated games worked just as normal games did anyway, they had the full game on the disc or cart and everything.
So kids in my country had a much easier access to gaming in the 90's than they do now to digital stores in 2026.
3. Digital Stores aren't as easily accessible to everyone.
- Regional differences, countries not being supported by Sony, MS and Nintendo.
It's all one big mess. It's downright wishful thinking to expect a country like Macedonia would ever get support from Sony for their PSN Store.
- The average person, especially in my part of the world still struggles with Digital Store access, setting up accounts, buying pre-paid gift/digital code cards for stores that don't support our region and even when they do support our country like Steam, it's too much for people to handle. Thankfully we have an abudnance of generic, but still used physical games here so the average normie can feed their GTA and FIFA Addiction all they want with used physical games or new ones if they so desire.
4. People would rather buy digital games here from shady folk who resell accounts than set up their own.
- I can’t count the number of times I see people asking for help on Macedonian gaming facebook groups about how to buy digitally from the PS Store, even how to set up an account. Buying games from these stores is especially complex for people since to do so you have to go jump through a bunch of hoops because Macedonia is not and never will be a supported country by Sony or Nintendo.
I can’t count the number of times parents my age have, people in their 40\s contacted me asking me to explain how to navigate these strange online stores on their kids Playstation or Switch, how to buy games if it’s even possible from Macedonia and so on.
Even when you explain everything carefully, these people often remain confused and opt for someone else to sort all this out for them, set up accounts and buy the game for them, someone who “understands” as they often say. That or something else you may have never heard of before, something far more weird and scammy and no I don’t mean piracy, we will discuss just what this is, in a bit.
You see, even when the store does support a country like Macedonia, there’s still hurdles that need to be bypassed, take Steam for example. It requires email registration, you need to deal with credit cards or paypal. These are things that a kid can’t just jump into and do on their own and many parents, my age, still find very confusing and uncomfortable to use.
Even EPIC’s free games don’t do much to help kids nowadays explore gaming because as I said, someone probably just set up their Fortnite and account for them. And since Fortnite is all they know and care about, game discovery ends there.
I speak from experience, because for every person who understands these things there are 50 who do not or aren’t even willing to learn.
This gave the raise to digital resellers, people who profit off of selling singular games, tied to a singular shared account to ignorant people.
These people would rather buy from a local guy who provides them with login instructions for the "game" than to buy their own game on their own account.
This does not help exposure, not one bit as they still only buy what's popular and don't do any kind of exploration themselves.
5. Not even DIGITAL PIRACY helps exposure the way Physical Piracy did back in the day.
I already mentioned that we had absolutely everything gaming in my country during the 90's and early 2000's, pirated, sure, but we had everything in huge stores, chuck full of physical games. Nowadays people who opt for piracy here just buy external HDDs for PS3 and PS4 full of games by resellers who charge per game on the thing.
But here's the thing, they barely explore any of the games on these HDDs, they just play GTA and FIFA or some popular AAA title all while still COMPLAINING how they miss the arcade games of the past, effectively ignoring any and all modern arcade games, beat em ups and so on.
At a physical store tho, when you'd get into a conversation about something like this with another customer, you could ask the clerks to try a game or few out, so you'd be able to show them some cool games right then and there. That's how I myself discovered some of my favorites growing up.
