My stupid decision to go completely digital

The Wii U Deluxe Digital Premium promotion has ended and now it’s time to post the results of my “experiment” into digital distribution with Nintendo. So, let’s get right down to it. Here are the results…

Nintendo Wii U Deluxe Digital Premium promotion

Since Wii U launched in Australia on 30 November 2012 all the way through till 31 December 2014, I have bought a total of 112 games for Wii U through eShop. 24 of those games are available to buy on a physical disc while the rest are digital exclusives including indie and virtual console games as well as downloadable content.

All prices listed in the table above are in Australian dollars, prices also vary depending on discounts and promotions occurring at the time. The promotion states that for every 500 points you gain by buying games through Wii U eShop, you get a code you can input into Wii U eShop that puts $7 Australian into your eShop account.

The total amount of points I gained throughout the promotional time period was 14080 which nets me 28 codes. At $7 Australian for each code, in total I acquired $196 Australian to use on Wii U and 3DS eShop throughout the entire promotion.

So after all that…

Was it worth it?

That’s A LOT of games to buy for just $196 worth of bonus money to spend, but before I render a final judgment, let’s look at this from another point of view. Out of all the games I bought through Wii U eShop, only 24 of these games have a physical disc release. Let’s take that list from above and cut them down to only those 24 games where I had a choice of buying physically instead of digitally.

Now that we’ve cut it down to only these 24 games, let’s have a little closer look at them. Most of the games are priced at $79.95 Australian, a standard price for games released by Nintendo on Wii U. Though, there are some games that I bought for a reduced price due to a promotional discount or through a permanent price reduction.

Setting aside the total points count for these 24 games, the total cost of these games comes to $1,582.36 Australian. Take away that $196 Australian that we got through the promotion and the final total comes down to $1386.36 Australian.

But was it WORTH it? Considering I bought most of these games on the day they were released, you would assume that at release, both digital and physical versions of the game would cost exactly the same. This assumption is false because I’ve already noticed some games that appear at least $10 Australian cheaper at retail at launch if you buy it at certain retailers like JB Hi-Fi or Big W.

However, if you take into account the discounts in eShop and price reductions for some of the games I bought later on, it’s not actually that bad. I think, with the Deluxe Digital Promotion, I actually got a fair enough deal with this entire promotion. I’m not saying it was a GOOD deal, all I’m saying is that, overall, I feel as though I didn’t save any money from this, but I didn’t waste any money buying digitally either.

With THAT said, the real question people are asking with an untamed fury is whether going digital is worth it in an entirely different way. With a physical disc, you have full undeniable ownership over the game. You insert the disc into the system and it plays, that’s it.

In a digital distribution model, you don’t explicitly own the game and you’re reliant on Nintendo to keep the game available on eShop for you to download. Years from now, some time down the line, the support for eShop will halt and through various reasons, we’ll most likely lose our “ownership” to the games we’ve bought through this digital distribution model.

Of course, this whole dilemma isn’t unique to Nintendo, it’s something all digital distribution models suffer from aside from GoG.com where you’re able to download the install file for a game straight onto your PC, DRM-free in all its glory.

But then there’s the specific issue many people have with Nintendo, their penchant for attaching your games to your console and not your account. Right now, I have an EXTREMELY expensive Wii U, because all the games I have bought to the system are locked to that specific Wii U.

The only way I can have my games on a different Wii U is if I unlink my Nintendo Network ID from my Wii U and then link it to a new Wii U. This is fine if you happen to buy a second Wii U, but disastrous if your Wii U is destroyed and you buy a new Wii U as a replacement. I think, currently, the only solution to this problem is to call Nintendo customer service in your country and get them to manually unlink your NNID from your console so you can link it to the replacement Wii U. It’s kind of a solution, but it puts too much power in the hands of Nintendo than a lot of people are willing to accept.

It is an archaic system, and despite the decision I’ve made to go full digital on Wii U, I completely agree that the current system being used for Wii U and 3DS is STUPID. For years now, Microsoft and Sony have run online digital distribution systems that have allowed people to have their accounts on multiple consoles. Plus if you get into a situation where your console has been destroyed and you need to transfer your digital games to a replacement, you have no problems with Microsoft and Sony.

With Microsoft and Sony, your games are tied to your account exclusively meaning that you take your games (AND saves) with you where ever you log in. When I go and play Halo with my nephew on his Xbox 360, I am able to log into my account and gain access to my account details including my achievement list. If I score a new achievement while playing on his console, it’ll be there when I get back home to my Xbox 360.

If I log into my account on my nephew’s Xbox 360 and then download a copy of Resident Evil 4 to his console, I’ll be able to play it there and have the save file for that game on his system since they’re saved through the cloud storage option on Xbox Live. In fact, he is able to play Resident Evil 4 HD on his console as well as long as my account stays active on his system. What does that mean?

That means that as long as I don’t log back into my account on MY OWN Xbox 360, my nephew can play Resident Evil 4 HD all he wants while logged into his own account. But as soon as I log into my account on my own Xbox 360, the license for RE4HD will expire on his system because it’s tied to my account and the license for digital distribution games can only be active on one system at a time, which depends on which system I am currently logged into with my account.

With PlayStation 3, it works in a similar manner, though a lot of games have a license that extends to at least two systems instead of just the one. It works the same way with PlayStation 4 and I THINK it works the same way with Xbox One, but I’m not 100% sure about that last bit.

So, since there is a clear solution to that problem, why doesn’t Nintendo just implement that with Wii U? The answer is because Nintendo is so backward when it comes to their online infrastructure that they didn’t think to allow such things in their system to begin with. Things have gotten SLIGHTLY better over the past two years, they’ve enabled people to unlink their accounts from their system as an option in the settings, but it’s still a backward archaic system. It’s stupid and Nintendo is stupid for not allowing a flexible enough digital distribution system when compared to Microsoft and Sony who offer a lot more flexibility on their systems.

Now, I’m not saying Microsoft and Sony’s solutions are perfect, they’re not. There are a lot of terrible things about digital distribution that these companies will never change, but they’re still not as bad as what Nintendo has right now. If my Wii U dies or is destroyed in a fire or whatever, I’m going to dread having to go through the procedure to get Nintendo to unlink my NNID from my destroyed system so I can link it to the replacement so that I can re-download all the games that I supposedly own.

Of course, even if I do get to the stage where I can re-download those games, I have no way of recovering all of that save data I had lost… though, backing up save data via USB, SD card or cloud storage on Wii U is a different issue altogether, but is yet another one of the strangely stupid things that Nintendo does for no apparent reason other than they just didn’t think of it to begin with.

But wait, it doesn’t end there. I’m going digital EVERYWHERE!

Through the latter half of 2014, I ended up buying a PlayStation 4 and an Xbox One. I have also gone completely digital with those two consoles as well to the point where I don’t have a single physical copy of any game for this current generation (PlayStation 4, Wii U and Xbox One). I have also gone completely digital on Nintendo 3DS and I’m going MOSTLY digital on my PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

And yeah, it’s a PRETTY stupid thing to do, mostly because it’s costing me extra money to do all of this, but they’re also not taking up any space… and believe me, these games are taking up A LOT of space, I honestly have no more room to buy new games physically because I have nowhere to put them any more.

The second reason this is stupid is that I’m giving up absolute ownership of my games for a license that enables me to play these games through Microsoft and Sony’s digital distribution models. Essentially, the amount of time I have to play these games isn’t up to me, it’s up to the companies involved… and that scares a lot of people. With physical media, people feel that they have more control over the ownership of their games than they do with digital distribution, which is true. Of course, the way I see it is that whether you buy your games physically or digitally, you only have a limited amount of time to play/own your games either way.

Let me explain…

Physical discs DO NOT last forever, they DO have an expiry date of sorts. It’s not an explicit expiry date, but optical discs last for about 10-15 years before they degrade, sometimes less depending on the quality of the production process. If you search for the term “disc rot” you’ll find out more about what I’m talking about and none of us are immune to it.

Of course, if one of my discs stops working, I can just find a replacement for that one disc, it’s annoying but simple (if I can find a copy of that game). However, if one of the hard drives I’m using for one of those systems dies, I’ll have to get a replacement hard drive and redownload EVERY SINGLE ONE of those games back onto that new hard drive. THAT is a hell of a lot more annoying and even worse for someone like me who lives in Australia and has to deal with bandwidth limits per month… but it’s a risk I’m willing to take, as stupid as that makes me seem.

Furthermore, consoles don’t last forever, at some point old hardware fails and these modern consoles of ours aren’t built the way older consoles are built. A Nintendo Entertainment System or a Sega Master System has a higher chance of surviving longer than your PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, mostly because the more complex the technology gets, the higher the failure rate get on various components. And yeah, repairing a console is always an option, but sometimes these things just die and most of us can’t do anything about it.

The final problem is something that has occurred a lot lately. There are quite a few games that have been delisted from PSN, Steam and Xbox Live over the last month or so. People who have bought these specific games before they were delisted are still able to redownload them, but for people who hadn’t bought them, they no longer have a chance to buy that game ever again unless it gets relisted in the future on that console or on a future console.

This is a legitimate concern, but for me, I feel that is a fair enough compromise… but ONLY if physical media continues to exist. In fact, I’m perfectly fine with digital distribution just as long as it’s not the ONLY option available to people. I strongly believe that physical media should never die because people still have the right to own these games without any strings attached. They should just be able to buy a game at a retailer, put in into their console and play it without any more steps than that, no Internet connection, no extra nonsense.

It’s a big part of the reason the entire gaming community made a huge uproar over the always online nonsense that Microsoft was trying to sling with the Xbox One. Not everyone has a stable and/or fast Internet connection. People NEED that option that allows them to buy media physically and not have any strings attached. So while digital distribution is, for me, a convenience and serves my own purposes, it’s not for everyone and shouldn’t be forced on everyone.

The best distribution models are the kinds that give people options that work for them. So with that, I’m going digital, completely digital, now I’m invincible, let’s all get digital! I mean… if you want.