With the digital age having taken over almost every aspect of our day to day lives, its easy to see why gaming as a medium has also begun to focus more and more on offering digital experiences to players. Valve’s online store Steam continues to grow in popularity offering an unrivaled and easily-accessible library of games, console games receive frequent updates to iron out any bugs and to add brand new content to keep players entertained. Newer Nintendo consoles even offer an online “virtual console” that has a massive collection of digital games from Nintendo’s past life of consoles, essentially giving players access to the entirety of Nintendo’s library at once. With this many positives and the medium’s reliance on digital distribution, it seems like the digital age of gaming is only going to grow from here, and therein exists the main problem.

Digital gaming, while powerful, is a medium without a lot of sustainability. Basically, digital gaming primarily focuses on the “here and now” and sometimes leaves the “then” in the past. A good example of this can be seen in regards to how Nintendo handled the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii’s online. The consoles both presented online shops wherein players could go to download a plethora of games. If anything ever happened to these games like a lost system or anything of the like, as long as you logged into the shop using your digital credentials, you could re-download your games free of charge because they were stored in your digital library. In 2017 and 2018 respectively, however, Nintendo shut down the online accessibility of these consoles. This means that, should anything ever happen to your system now, there’s absolutely no way to recover these games. This also means that, the entire library of games that were exclusive to the online shops of these consoles, have been completely lost to the world and there’s no way for players to ever get their hands on them.

Digital gaming is incredibly convenient, nobody can deny that, and its existence has allowed for some truly amazing things to come to fruition. However, many players get too wrapped up in the convenience which softens the blow of just how….immaterial digital games are. Once you’ve purchases a physical copy of a game, there’s no one that can take that way from you unless you’re careless with the game and break/lose it or someone gets a bit too hands-on and steals it. With digital games…well, they’re a ticking time clock counting down to an inevitable fate.