Quote Originally Posted by The Adventurer View Post
They aren't special. All media is heading this way; from books, to magazines, to comics, to movies, to TV shows, to Video Games. Its just the way the economics are moving in the entertainment industry as a whole. Obsessing about the storage medium of a game being integral to the gaming experience is about as short sighted as saying the most important part about reading is being able to smell the book.
That's funny you mention that, because one of the things I enjoy most about reading is the feel and smell of the books. I'm not going to pay for e-books when I can go buy a physical copy of the same thing. Same goes for comics. I don't like forking over money for things that I don't get a physical item for except in certain scenarios. Everyone who embraces everything digital-only will be sorry when their power goes out for more than two minutes and they realize they don't even have any books to read because they only bought digital copies of them. You really want to trust everything to the cloud and to the corporations? I love seeing a shelf full of books or games or CDs, and organizing them, putting the things I enjoy most in places of honor on my shelves. I can't do that with digital stuff. Or, "Merry Christmas, daughter. Here's a piece of paper I printed out with the download code for that game you wanted" - yay?

It's not that I shun technology, or the internet, or social media, or new advances in technology. But I think that things can coexist without physical things disappearing. It makes me sad to think that if everything goes digital, all the "stuff" that we pass on to people when we die won't exist, and will probably be locked up in some online account, inaccessible behind TOS and unable to be passed to our offspring and family and friends. Which is really the entertainment industry's wet dream - making people pay for the same things over and over forever.