Gamers were full of shit (at least core gamers on forums bitching and moaning).
Remember back when everyone was complaining about digital games, system checks, online required connection etc.... Discs ruled for a laundry list of reasons from price, to trading/lending, to collectability, to lack of ownership of digital games if you read the TOS etc... There must had been 10 key reasons.
Fast forward to around 2020, and I think console gamers were already around 60-70% digital I think. Nintendo skewed lower, but PS/Xbox was higher. Now, it's got to be an even higher rate. Probably 80% I'd guess.
This is either a misunderstanding on your part, or revisionist history. I'm not sure which, so let me clarify.
Certainly there are people who love their physical media and disparage digital delivery at every opportunity because they (correctly) see it as a threat to physical media. I don't care about physical media at all, but I sympathize with those who do. This has been and always will be a concern for some portion of the player base.
But the real point where people were "complaining about digital games" was the original plan for the Xbox One. Microsoft's original plan was
not a digital delivery system like Steam, and what the console storefronts have now. The Steam model of selling games digitally via a one-time-use key that binds a license to a users account actually existed On Xbox before the Xbox One. Microsoft and Sony started allowing full games to be purchased from their stores at the tail end of the PS3 and 360 generation. I was very active on multiple gaming forums and listening to gaming podcasts/YouTube at that time. All I saw were neutral or positive comments about more choice and options .
What Microsoft tried to do with the Xbox One was different. They wanted to sell you a disc that had a key. You would buy the game disc and enter the key while connected to the online service so it could bind that key to your account. That would be fine if it ended there. You could go offline because your local console knows that your account has a license to play the game as confirmed by the ecosystem's server. This is what we have with the current digital storefronts on all ecosystems.
The part that ruined Xbox One was they wanted to give Game Stop (and other used game retailers) a system for unbinding that key from your account so they could resell the disc. Why is that a problem for the user? If Microsoft can't be sure that I haven't sold the disc for the game I'm trying to play, and therefore I no longer have the key bound to my account, then they have to do regular check-ins with an authentication server to verify all the keys on my console are still valid. If they didn't, I could buy a disc, install the game and bind the key to my account while my console is online, then go offline, go sell the disc to Game Stop where they unbind that key from my account. I could then go home and keep playing the game with my console offline, even though I no longer have the key bound to my account. Just requiring the disc to be in the drive would leave the door open for piracy if/when people figured out how to duplicate those discs.
This is where the idea of a mandatory online check-in every 24 hours came into play. With the scenario above, if I sold the disc to Game Stop and they unbound the key from my account, I would only be able to play the game without having a valid key for less than 24 hours. Then the console would connect to the server, see that I don't have that key anymore, and the next time I try to boot that game I get a message telling me I don't have a valid license to play it. Presumably I would then be prompted to buy a new key from the digital store, at which point my ownership of that game would shift to a strictly digital license like we have now.
The idea that I should have to tolerate a mandatory daily check-in with the server just so Microsoft could help keep Game Stop in business was the giant "fuck you" moment so many of us had towards the Xbox brand. That also means I have to rely on Microsoft having the authentication servers up 100% of the time so I don't get stuck in a situation where I just can't play my games at all, because their infrastructure was down. At that time, we had seen multiple events where Azure had gone down for
days at a time leaving their customers non-operational.
So yes, some people do complain about digital because they just like physical media better. But the Xbox One was a very special case where they had a different plan for "digital" than every other digital storefront. It was a terrible plan and I still can't believe the management team at Xbox at that time thought it would fly.
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