Technology is changing rapidly these days and so the question does arise, why download open world games? Shouldn’t we just continue buying them on discs? These are definitely valid questions, but you have to keep in mind what’s going on today in the digital world.

GameStop just recently posted its holiday results and they were not good. The company had a 16.4% decline over this time last year according to yahoo finance. What has apparently contributed to the decline is lower in store traffic as well as the ability to download games digitally (there are other factors as well).

That does make sense because if you think about it, why would you want to leave the comfort of your own home when you can just pay for and download the game through the PlayStation Store, Amazon, or even at GameStop’s website?

With speeds increasing for high speed internet as well as streaming video and downloading and saving to a hard drive, it just makes it more convenient to download a game. Not too long ago, I had installed a 2 terabyte hard drive on my PS4.

I’ve had the hard drive for quite a while, but had always been afraid to do it because I just kept thinking something would go wrong and I would lose everything I had saved, games and all, on the stock 500GB hard drive the PS4 originally came with.

The thing is though I was rapidly running out of room to store anything on my PS4. I only had 28 gigabytes left which meant I might be lucky and be able to install one more game on the system, but would not have room for anything else.

I decided to take the plunge and just go ahead and do it and I have to say it was much easier than I thought. All I had to do was copy my save game data on a USB drive or upload it and save it to Sony’s cloud service (I did both) thus ensuring I wouldn’t lose anything.

The new hard drive came with crystal clear and very easy to follow instructions on how to remove the hard drive and install the new one. It even came with a screw driver needed to remove the screws holding the old one in.

First thing I needed to do though was go to the PlayStation website to download the OS for the PS4 since I would need to install that on the new hard drive. Once I did that, all I had to do was unplug the PS4, take the left cover off which I just had to push down slightly and slide off, and then unscrew the hard drive bay so I could remove the old one and put the new 2 terabyte one in.

Once I put the new one in, then the fun would begin. I had to put the USB drive into the PS4 and then boot it up in safe mode so I could install the OS. After that was finished, then began the tedious re-installing of all my games and trust me, that took quite awhile.

What really took it so long was not only installing the games back on the system, but also downloading all the latest updates for my open world games.

I have a fairly fast internet connection at 50Mbps so it wasn’t like I had to wait for days to download some of these large updates.

While a good majority of my games are on physical discs, there are two games that aren’t and I had to re-download them. One of them is the horror game Outlast and the other one is The Last Of Us Remastered edition.

A great thing about downloading games is that once you purchase them and download them, you can go back to your purchase history and re-download them should the need arise which it did for me. That makes it very convenient because sometimes we just tend to lose the physical discs and you don’t have to worry about trying to find digital copies of the game.

The downsides of having to download open world games or any other genre of games is that if you don’t have a fast internet connection, which there is still a good chunk in the US that don’t, it can take quite a long time to download, plus some internet providers have monthly data caps.

My internet provider unfortunately does have data caps, but thankfully they have raised them. When I first signed up with them, I had a monthly cap of 250GBs. A few years later they raised it to 350GBs and then towards the end of last year, they raised it to 1 terabyte.

I think my internet provider has finally realized that more and more people are streaming and downloading and are just consuming huge amounts of data. 250GBs and even 350GBs just doesn’t cut it anymore especially someone who binge watches a show on Netflix, which also now lets you download for offline view, and the fact that video games that are downloaded are of the magnitude of tens of gigs.

Believe it or not I haven’t finished re-downloading the entire game of The Last Of Us. I have the single player portion of it downloaded, but not the multiplayer part of it yet. The entire game is nearly 40 gigs in size.

The point I’m trying to make by talking about my experience of installing a new hard drive and re-installing games is that of the couple of them I had to download, it was just easier and more convenient then having to deal with the physical game discs, at least it was for me.

If you look at how well Amazon did this past holiday season, you might not be surprised at the staggering amount of sales they did which even includes digital downloads of movies and games. They just keep growing and growing every year. The amount of products I ordered from Amazon has also increased last year, ranging from phone cases, to blue-tooth keyboards, and e-books.

Physical game discs will still be around awhile, but the market share keeps shrinking each year while digital downloads is only growing. Now that I have more room on my PS4 thanks to the larger hard drive, I probably will end up buying more games to download.

So why download open world games? It’s a matter of convenience plain and simple and that is where today’s world is headed every year. What do you think? Do you still prefer game discs over digital downloads? Feel free to post your comments and thoughts below.