Get Physical - Meatspace Preorder Bonuses

When Sony released the comically inadequate PSP Go, it seemed as though physical media might not be a thing that made the transition into the next generation of handhelds. On paper that seemed like a fine idea, especially for people who wanted to carry around a library of games without the hassle of lugging around a collection of UMDs, miniscule though they may be. Unfortunately, with no way to transfer their existing collection of UMD games onto their PSP Go, owners of the handheld were stuck with the unappealing and frankly criminal prospect of having to repurchase their games on PSN, those which were available anyway. This is probably the single largest contributing factor to the failure of the PSP Go, and although support for full retail releases on PSN has been adequate, there are still a lot of gaps in the library and far from every title is available. Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was just released this week and is available on PSN, but there's still no legitimate reason to ever purchase it as a downloadable title unless of course you only have a PSP Go to play it on, and not one of the many superior older model PSPs.

For starters, pre-ordering the retail box game would have got you this incredibly sweet tarot card set featuring the 22 original art major arcana that you might remember from playing Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen on SNES so many years ago (or on Wii Virtual Console not so many years ago). Even if you didn't preorder, this game comes with a manual so thick it hearkens back to the days of PC gaming before there stopped being any particular reason to buy boxed PC games (i.e. Steam). It's imaginable that they would have made the manual thicker if there weren't such a limited amount of space in the box. It is crammed full of the kind of useful information that is necessary to succeed playing a game which requires a bit more effort than most modern games which simply task you with remember that square is a light attack and triangle is a strong attack. They must have simply ran out of room judging by the absence of the ludicrous "notes" pages that occasionally still appear in the flimsy pamphlets that pass for game manuals these days. God of War III, does your manual really need a notes section? The answer is an emphatic "NO."

So what is the deal with downloadable games anyway then? It makes sense on a platform such as Apple's app store, where there has never been a precedent for boxed games since the devices have never had physical media drives. It also makes sense for PC games which are becoming an increasingly niche market, and also exist on a somewhat of an eternal format. You can rest assured that your Windows PC games you purchased on Steam will always play on a Windows PC for as long as the platform is around, which will probably be forever. Consoles and handhelds are a different matter altogether though on account of their generational hardware iterations, unless you're Nintendo, who have recently been pretty stellar about maintaining backwards compatibility across their platforms. The exception of course are titles that are available only as downloads due to their narrow appeal or insubstantial nature that does not warrant a full box release. How long, though, until the new generation of consoles or handhelds no longer have physical media drives? When will box sales become negligible to the point that publishers no longer care about maintaining a relationship with brick and mortar retailers? Hopefully that day will never come, for more than a few reasons.

First of all, you can give a goodbye kiss to most of your ownership of the games you laid hard earned cash down for. As of now there's no way to share downloadable titles, sell them back to the store (if you're into that sort of thing) or even lend them to friends, and it seems unlikely that such a system would ever be implemented. Additionally, the incentive for publishers to offer awesome preorder bonuses or collector's editions goes right out the window. Without a physical product, there is no medium by which to deliver things like original soundtracks, art books, terrible "making of" documentaries, or the rare creepy perverted mouse pad. Obviously there are huge incentives for publishers to eliminate physical media if they can do so without impacting sales, and luckily that time has not yet come. Unfortunately, it seems inevitable the infrastructure required to deliver that product to every potential customer will someday exist, and that will be a sad day for us all. Until then, keep it real.