I tell friends that digital is great if you have only young children or live in a neighborhood with occasional break-ins - otherwise, it has almost no redeeming

I tell friends that digital is great if you have only young children or live in a neighborhood with occasional break-ins - otherwise, it has almost no redeeming qualities. Daughter got a great game for Christmas? She can’t share it with siblings, or friends in real life, or friends from another state (why not mail game cards once in a while?). Kind of a huge shame really if it was a single-player game with a finite beginning and end. It’s dumber though for collecting too. As a collector, if you buy used… the games you bought for $35-40 will probably sell for at least $30-35 (if they are Nintendo). They might even explode like the GameCube or 3DS. And with 70%~80% of Switch purchases being digital, there’s going to be a real physical media shortage when the eShop goes down. (At a minimum though, if they keep even 75% of their value over a 5-year period after you bought them for $38 or so used, you could spend $1000 on Switch games, have it still be worth $750, and have paid about $50/yr to have a ludicrous catalog. Can’t think that way with digital.) Which, that’s just great too. Digital is not very resilient to any kind of cyberwarfare, or AWS having a bad day. Just when you need it most, it’s gone. I rate our odds of keeping electricity available as being much higher than computers and digital equipment. Edit: And while I keep adding reasons; remember that physical means you have the ability to always play the game version physically on the card. (If you update the game after inserting the card, you do need to factory-reset your Switch to go back to that older version for various reasons, but you can still get to it.) This matters quite a bit if a game becomes more bloated and slow over time (Minecraft), or if the game had useful duplication bugs that were patched (Zelda: TOTK). Digital downloads? You're stuck with whatever update they give you.