With today’s game consoles, it is easier than ever to download games rather than buy the physical copy (game disc) of a game. I’ve talked some about that not to long ago in my article called “Why Download Open World Games“.

While the sale of actual game discs is still dominant, sales of digital copies of games keep increasing every year and it becomes a matter of convenience and it is actually easier to keep track of.

You no longer have to wait for a game disc to load and will save some time having it load from the hard drive. Granted you do need to make sure you have room on your hard drive for a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 as it is a very large game file and you have to take into account the patches and extra content that Rockstar loves to release.

Now granted, with a game disc, you still have to install the game on the PS4, but you still have to have the game disc inserted into the console in order to start it.

While I do have the physical copy of Grand Theft Auto 5, I’m increasingly wishing I had bought a digital copy of it instead. When I installed a new 2 terabyte hard drive into my PS4, I had to begin the process of reinstalling games and it was kind of a pain having to locate all the game discs scattered about in my room.

Not all my games were physical copies though and the great thing about downloading games from the PlayStation store is that your purchase and download history is saved so you can just download them again without having to pay since you already paid for the game once.

For a game like Grand Theft Auto 5, this can make it easier especially if say for some reason the disc drive on the PS4 wears out and it won’t eject the disc or you can’t insert one and you just don’t have the money to fix it especially if the warranty has run out.

 

You can also put your saved game data for GTA 5 onto a USB drive so say your hard drive gives out for whatever reason (and you didn’t back up into the cloud service), whenever you get a new hard drive and have to reinstall the game, you’ve got all your saved game data on the USB drive, plus whatever extras you might have downloaded for GTA 5 such as themes and whatnot. 

Here is what Sony has recently done that makes me really happy and just supports the cause of downloading games in general. The latest firmware updated for the PS4 now makes it possible to use external hard drives for storage so you no longer just have to solely rely on the internal hard drive.

This makes it so much more convenient because it can become tedious to keep replacing the internal hard drive to hold an ever increasing library of games or even downloaded movies and tv shows. I’ve got a couple of external hard drives so this would be wonderful for me especially for Grand Theft Auto 5 since it is probably the biggest game in terms of size and files on my PS4.

There is a downside though because if you don’t have a good internet connection, I’d say 12 Mbps or higher, it is going to take you an incredibly long time to download GTA 5 or other games of similar size. You’ve also got to keep in mind some internet providers have monthly data limits in which a large downloading of games can quickly eat into that data limit.

In my case I’ve got a 1 terabyte limit each month from internet provider and my internet speed is 50 Mbps.  A game the size of GTA 5 would take me a few hours versus a day or more with lower internet speeds. 

The great thing about Grand Theft Auto 5 (and many other games) is that you can download them at many different places online. You can purchase and download them from the PlayStation store, Rockstar’s website, Amazon, Gamestop, Best Buy, Target, and more. 

So for those who haven’t played or purchased Grand Theft Auto 5, buy the game digitally and at Amazon, it is currently going for $29.00 for the digital copy.