Digital Distribution and you

[Vampyr]

I prefer to do a mixture of both.

I am a huge fan of Steam, and I have bought a ton of games from them over the past year or so. However, all of these games have one thing in common: I didn't pay full price for them.

I don't buy digital copies of games that are selling for the same price that they are in the store. This is because I assume retail value of an item is marked to include shipping, handling, and packaging. If all those things are gone, I expect to pay less. I understand it costs something to keep the servers running, but I doubt it's the same as the manufacture of discs, writing the game to the disk, creating of packaging, the manual, shipping, and handling.

I don't mind that I can't resell the games, because I never resell games anyway. Games also don't make good collectors items in the traditional sense: it's cool to have a shelf full of great games, but the value of a game very rarely increases over time. There are only a few exceptions, and those exceptions are often rereleased.