The next generation of consoles is almost upon us and both Sony and Microsoft are offering digital only variants of their consoles. They’re temping with their lower price point, but is digital gaming really worth it?

On the surface, it seems like a great deal. Downloading games isn’t a new thing and if you’re a gamer, almost certainly a fair chunk of your library is dedicated to digital gaming. And when you look at a feature like Xbox Game Pass it’s easy to see why you’d want to go with a digital only console.

Games Pass. 100s of Games for cheap!

Games Pass gives you access to hundreds of games for a small monthly payment. It’s like Netflix but for games (is a comparison I’m sure nobody else has made)! But it’s not without its downsides. While the library is ever expanding, it’s also constantly shrinking.

Month after month new games are added but other games are taken away, and you’ll never know which ones are going to go next. So good luck to you if you’re only halfway through that epic RPG you only have a few hours to play a week after work. Because there’s a good chance it’ll be gone before you ever get close to finishing it.

But losing access to your favorite games isn’t the only downside of all digital gaming. Storage space is another big issue. Games can get pretty damn big these days. Sure, both the new consoles come with SSDs with 800GB of storage but that can disappear very fast.

The Storage Space Race

Call of Duty Warzone takes up 100GB by itself (250GB on PC!), as does Red Dead Redemption 2. Imagine having a quarter of your storage space taken up by two games. And you won’t want to delete them because downloading them takes fucking forever! And you especially won’t if you have a data cap on your broadband. While this isn’t common in Europe it certainly can be an issue in the US or in Australia where broadband issues continue to be a constant issue.

Of course not all games are so big, but many of the triple A games are beefy. And they only get beefier over time. DOOM 2016 was only 45GB at launch but after months of updates that filesize grew to 78GB!

And yes of course you can upgrade your storage, but that won’t be an optimal solution. The new generation will offer support for external hard drives, which are fairly cheap, but they’ll be considerably slower than the internal SSDs. Solid State Drives can be as much as 8 times faster than Hard Drives. Microsoft will be offering SSD expansion options… at the cost of about £230 for another terabyte. You can easily get an SSD of the same size for less than half the price on Amazon. There’s also only 1 slot for SSD expansion, meaning you might have to resort to using external hard drives for more storage.

UPDATE: Sony have revealed the PS5 will have support for M.2 NVME SSDs in their new PS5 Teardown video. That’s a much better solution to Microsoft’s proprietary SSDs.

Games, finally!

Storage isn’t the only thing you’ll be spending money on. Obviously you’ll be buying games. Unlike physical games you won’t be able to trade any of them in, or get a decent discount on a second hand one. There are definitely discounts to be found on digital store fronts but they’re often not as good as you’d get in a normal shop.

And the discounts are likely to be lesser in the future. Right now MicroSoft and Sony have to compete with physical stores for selling their games. In the future, when there’s a larger amount of digital only console gamers, they’ll have less competition.

When you buy a PS5 or Series X digital version, you’re locked into MicroSoft or Sony’s store front. At that point, they could charge whatever they want for their games because you can’t buy them anywhere else.

I’m an all digital gamer at heart

Now, it would be remiss of me to not mention PC gaming in all of this. I have almost a thousand games on PC and only 1 of those is a physical disc. Little bit hypocritical, eh? Well, it’s a bit different on PC.

For one thing, there are a lot more options for storage. 6 USB ports means I could have 6 external hard drives as well as internal drives if I wanted. But also, PC games are generally far cheaper than console games because there’s so much competition in the market.

There are so many online stores that only deal in PC games and they’re all fighting for your money. And because download keys are unlimited, they can sell them at very low prices. Still though, given the choice, I would like to have more physical copies of my pc games.

So there you have it! That’s why I think an all digital console is a bad idea. You could easily lose access to games you’re paying to play, you’ll likely not have much room to store them all and there’s a good chance you’ll end up paying a higher price than you would’ve for a physical copy.

The regular versions of the new consoles aren’t overly expensive, and with the ability to trade in or buy second hand copies, it would most likely save you more money in the long run to just wait and save up for a disc based system.

So what do you think? Will you be sticking with a tradition disc based console or going with digital gaming only? Tell me what you think down in the comments, or on Twitter.