Showcase season may be over but that doesn’t mean the constant stream of news and updates is any less constant. With this winter-gaming season looking one of the busiest and biggest yet, gamers around the world are going to have to think long and hard about what they’re using their free time on. October alone is one of the most stacked gaming months in recent memory, with the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Forza Motorsport, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage and Alan Wake 2 releasing, and that’s only a drop in the ocean!
Related: Alan Wake 2’s Developers Championing Single Player Games, Putting Story and Experience First
For good reason Alan Wake 2 is one of the most anticipated games of the year, with fans of the franchise having to wait a very long thirteen years since the first game to be able to return to Bright Falls and pickup the story of Alan Wake. However, not all news seems to be good news for the game lately, with recent reports confirming that there won’t be a physical release of the game whatsoever.
Alan Wake 2 – More time to Polish?
AAA games not releasing on a physical disc seems to be becoming a far too regular occurrence of late, with Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name following in Alan Wake’s footsteps, whilst the likes of the upcoming Switch port for the Batman: Arkham Trilogy having a physical release, but two of the games included will be digital codes?
In the midst of fan outcry at this potential erasure of an important aspect of video games – the collection on our shelves, and our ability to resell physical copies, recouping our money – Remedy Games have spoken on the issue in an interview with Eurogamer, in an attempt to calm the storm.
“As creatives obviously, by going digital-only it does allow us more time to polish the game, like, a significant amount of weeks actually. Because otherwise, the game that goes on the disc, obviously it has to be playable without a patch. We didn’t want to release something that we weren’t proud of basically, and that we didn’t want players to play. So hopefully this way we can give you a better version of the game.”
Game Director Kyle Rowley’s reasoning above certainly makes sense. Digital only means they can be working on the game much closer to actual release, without needing to ‘Go Gold’ on the game, get it distributed just to then have the physical release patched to match the working they’d been doing since on the digital version. This is of course a completely different reason than was given in the Alan Wake FAQ on their website when this story first broke, with cost-cutting and passing the savings onto the consumer being the reason at the time.
Whatever the reason(s) may be, the slow removal of physical properties from the market is not good news for fans. From not being able to sell your copy, lend it to a friend or see it on your shelf, to potentially losing access to it once licence’s expire, the game’s complete removal from libraries and the total lack of control over what we’ve paid for means that fans should be making more noise about this. It may be the future, but that doesn’t mean we have to completely remove the physical side does it?
What do you think? Will the lack of a physical copy provide extra development time for the developers? Will you be buying Alan Wake 2? Or any of the other AAA games going digital only? Let us know in the comments!
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