In Stav Kimhi’s blog, “Is It Game Over for Video Game Stores?“, she points out the video game industry might follow the decreasing tendency since the sales of both DVD and CD decreases substantially. She thinks the access of downloading digital copies from online stores would decrease the demand of physical video game copies and as a result the profit of physical video game retail stores will be affected.

Here are  my personal opinions about the disadvantages of digital copies, which cause me to think the effect from digital copies will not have conspicuous impact to the profit of video game retail stores like EB Games and Game Stop. Purchasing the video games online will require the consumers to download the games from the online store. The process of downloading takes time, and the downloaded files will occupy partition of the storage. To those video game lovers, they will have plentiful video games; if all of them are digital copies, the storage will be out of space. In order to download new games, the gamers need to delete the old games. The cycles of downloading and deleting take time to proceed. Gamers need to purchase external hard drives, in order to not keep all the games they have downloaded without deleting them for new games, but the purchase of hard drives will be additional expenses to gamers. With the purchase of the extra external hard drives, the opportunity costs of using digital copies will increase dramatically, since the prices of the physical copies and digital copies are similar. Only for part of the games, the digital copies’  price are cheaper than the physical copies’. To me, if the price of the two types of video games are identical, I will definitely choose the physical copy, because it is realistic and can be placed on the shelves as my video game collection.

Overall, from purchasing the physical copies, gamers can save both their time and money. The growth of the digital copies is undeniable fact, but i don’t think this will threat the profit of retail stores and cause them to shut down.

Reference:

“Download From Playstation Store Or Buy Physical DVD Game?” GameSpot. CBS Interactive Inc., n.d. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.

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