4794

oh you did, or you wouldn’t have access to them!

4795

ah they need to be grabbed from the online thing, not the store, probably.

4796

Ok, I got my Switchoon today and it is lovely. However, I haven’t bought any games yet and have a n00b question I need clarifying before I do: 13 Sentinels is like £50 on the online store but £33 for the physical version. If I buy the physical version, can I basically just install it then chuck the media in a drawer somewhere until such a time where I’d wanna re-install it?

(This would be, like, the first physical game I’ve bought in 9 years - the last was Alien Isolation.)

4797

Like all consoles, if you have a physical copy of a game, you have to have the physical media in the system to be able to play it.

4798

No. Physical games have to be in the device to play them.

The good thing about physical though is you can share them and/or re-sell them when you’re done with them.

4799

And you have them forever, even after the eShop is terminated and your Switch dies and you buy a replacement on eBay.

Patches/DLC, well, idk. But I BELIEVE they can be transferred from one Switch to another without either of them being on the Internet. Patches can, at least, if Nintendo documentation is to be believed. DLC maybe not since Nintendo would want to nanny the copyright status.

4800

Assuming you haven’t lost them. I lost something like a dozen of my DS carts and Switch carts are even smaller.

4801

I mean… that’s kind of a you problem. That’s not exactly common. That’s why they give you those plastic boxes to keep them in.

4802

I’ve lost my top collection of the very best of the DS. 12 incredible game cartridges. I had put them in a very safe place before changing continents. When I got back home a few years ago, I couldn’t find them. Haven’t been able since. They are really, really safe!

4803

I have a pretty pragmatic view of digital games on Nintendo platforms.

I have a lot of digital games on my 3DS, and a few across Wii and Wii U.

  • Wii - The few digital games I have, I already chose to repurchase on newer platforms anyway. I doubt I’ll go back to play my Wii, but if I do, any digital-only games I have I have no qualms in hacking and downloading illigitimately.

  • Wii U - I already sold the console. The digital games, I either don’t care about, or have access to on newer consoles

  • 3DS - Most of my catalog is digital. So far, Nintendo has not announced plans to disable downloads of existing purchases, just disabling new purchases. So for now I’m good. Eventually, they might also disable downloads. If they do, I’ll just hack my 3DS and download my games from other sources. Kind of annoying, not that big of a deal to me personally. It’s supposed to be easy enough to do anyway.

  • Switch - My entire catalog is digital. Hopefully it’ll be forwards-compatible with new hardware too. I bet this will stick around for a long time, even longer than 3DS. If it doesn’t, then I’ll hack my Switch just like I would 3DS, or get everything via emulators on Steam Deck, or otherwise

So yeah, it’s not ideal, I wish these platforms just stuck around forever, but if they don’t I’ll manage anyway.

As for pricing - yeah Switch eShop games can be expensive. But there are also some deep discounts similar to other platforms, so you can build up your library pretty cheaply over time.

Except for Nintendo first-party games, which stay at full price almost indefinitely - though their Voucher program (2 games for $100) kind of helps with that.

4804

If you’re travelling, which you often are with a handheld device, it’s not exactly practical to bring each game in its own box.

4805

There are very, very few games I ever return to after completing them. There’s just always something shinier and newer to play!

That isn’t to say at one point I didn’t care deeply about this sorta thing; I had several large cardboard boxes filled to their brims with every game I owned. Unfortunately after dragging them from rental to rental to rental I found myself stuck in a position where I had nowhere to store them, needed some quick cash, and was just generally resentful of the expense/hassle of lugging them around. In the Marie Kondo sense (tho she wasn’t on the go back then), they just weren’t actually bringing me much joy.

So I made the decision to get rid of the lot, save for a handful of titles which were outstandingly meaningful to me in some way (i.e. UFO: Enemy Unknown was the first game I ever owned; an at-the-time unwanted* birthday gift. I’ve still got it, currently on the shelf above me. I doubt the floppies work.).

Most ended up on ebay and, upsettingly, I got next to nothing for them. It was barely worth the effort; there’s a lot of time consuming admin involved with photographing and creating those listings and after ebay took its cut and a couple fell foul to scammers I made a pittance. The ones I couldn’t sell I made the decision to just throw away, though I did save the discs for some in one of those CD wallet thingies.

The experience was, in its own way, heartbreaking - I was casting aside a good chunk of my life up to that point. However, as a result of that I’ve been a lot less concerned with the material nature of this sorta thing. I’m in it for the experience alone, and the replay experience is never the same as the initial one; there’s probably only one old game that still has any meaningful impact for me.

Anyway, not really an argument or an attempt to sway opinions; just sharing some melancholy personal philosophy… Which I have no idea how to apply when the physical version is 17 quid cheaper. =\

* I’d played the demo, had no idea what I was doing, got everyone killed immediately and consequently thought the whole thing sucked. So that was one miserable birthday present - “But you like sci-fi aliens! And it got good reviews!”. I begrudgingly played it - my parents didn’t keep the receipt - and, ok, maybe after awhile it kinda maybe didn’t actually suck. Entirely.

4806

It sounds like you should buy it physical, play it through or not, and then take it and trade it for your next physical game.

4807

i read a lot and hard a lot about trading ins for many years : can you bring back a used game to trade with a new one in your countries? here this would work only for used market, and usually was not much worth it given how little you got back.
i also remember hearing and reading about game renting, which sounds properly like utopia to me.

4808

Yes. You can trade games in for new games in the US. You receive store credit that reduces the price of the new game. It depends where you trade it in how much you receive.

Another option is to simply re-sell it on ebay or Facebook Marketplace, etc where a game that is still fairly new will net you more $$$.

4809

I relate to this. I’m not a hoarder but I realised recently that a lot of my oldish-new games and consoles just weren’t being played and when I really thought about it, I was unlikely to go back to them with any enthusiasm so I said to myself that I’d sell it all. Problem is, as you say, selling stuff properly takes time preparing the listing, taking decent pics etc. and there’s usually a cut taken by eBay followed by the hassle of postage and packaging.

Thankfully there’s an exchange store chain in the UK (‘Computer Exchange’ aka CEX) that pays out pretty well for the right goods and they have a site you can punch things into to check the sell prices. I spent a bit of time just comparing their prices against eBay ending soon auctions. Anything worth anything I took to CEX in town, anything else that had little to no value is being freecycled or given to a charity shop.

There are some games that have sentimental value to me still that I keep on my shelf boxed like Thief 1 and 2, Monkey Island 2, F-Zero GX etc. I have a load of old PS1 and Dreamcast games that I’m sure are worth more to someone but I’ve not decided on what to do with those yet. Those are the few things I am currently hanging on to!

I remember someone taking my Amiga 500 and bags full of floppy disks–some original but most pirated–off our hands back in the day and they never paid up. I’m still kind of gutted about that because some of those labelled and relabelled scruffy disks were really cool and personal/unique. I downloaded a version of WinUAE about 15 years ago and for some reason it was huge. Little did I know it came bundled with pretty much every Amiga game. That’s when I first played UFO: Enemy Unknown which I recall seeing as a kid and being curious about. That experience, even all those years later on a presumably bad port on an emulator, prompted me to buy the game on PC and I loved it, at least once OpenXCOM swung round :D

4810

Game renting was booming round here some 25 years ago (my teens). And given the length of a lot of games then, a weekend rental and binging with some friends was more times than not enough to beat a game. I tried and finished many, many games like than then.

(in retrospect, it was probably illegal. These were not special rental cartridges -like the special rental VHSs video rental places used- so likely the terms of sale didn’t allow for renting)

4811

We had a couple of CEX stores in NYC, they offered top dollar for games and DVDs. Got rid of a ton of DVDs I replaced with Blu Rays and also picked up some fantastically priced games. Unfortunately, both stores closed about 2 years later.

4812

Snipperclips is $10 at Gamestop, digital. It had some positive word of mouth here at launch so I grabbed it.

4813

There is also a demo for it. It requires quite some skills :O