You're all used to the familiar feel of a shiny new game wrapped in some evil form of plastic that takes longer than it should to come off, the smell of the new manual and smooth touch of the disc as you take it out for the first time to ravage it for the next X hours but the era of physical gaming media is shrinking at an alarming rate, let's find out what's causing this move to digital over physical and explain why it's a practice you should support.

Firstly the most obvious reason for publishers and developers working in the industry is that it's just cheaper to sell a game over a digital platform rather than go to the trouble of paying someone to design a cover, making sure the art/design is approved in the respective countries, writing up a game manual, the cost to print and manufacture and not to mention all the people a long the line that need to be paid just to sell a game in a shop.

Now the digital method. Not only is it cheaper by cutting out so many middle-people and selling straight to the customer it gives small independent companies a real chance to get their game out there among the people of the world who would really love to play it (us) and also stops these independent developers from having to climb through a years worth of corporate policy, censorship and other general BS.

Let's take a little moment to talk about the esthetics of physical gaming. Say for example you own 2,000 Playbox-U games, that's a lot of cases isn't it? Where the hell are you gonna fit that many game cases? You'll have to start renting some off-site storage and occasionally walk/drive/skip over to swap some games because your house would be full to bursting point. Although what if said games were simply downloaded (legally please, I'll have no discussion of pirating). A modern game takes up roughly between 4 - 10 Gigabytes of virtual space. I've done the math and it looks something like this:

V = Virtual Space. P = Physical space. V = P / 1024

(Disclaimer: Math may not be accurate awaiting response from NASA to calculate findings)

It's easy to download a game, you just click download and wait, a process that is becoming even easier with faster average download speeds across the world and you can always redownload it later. Although what happens if you lose your game disc? What happens if a younger sibling decides they want to be a cat for the day and run their finely sharpened nails across the disc or outright destroy it "accidentally". How many games have you lost to physical damage over the years?

Virtual gaming is everywhere these days and if you don't already own a digital title of some format I can promise that you will soon, if you look at the industry you'll see it's a growing trend and is being used by almost every major video game company. For example the 3DS has it's new store and ambassador program full of downloadable games you already own, The PS3, Xbox360 and Wii all have virtual stores where you can purchase and play games and let's not forget the PC which has more virtual outlets than this article has words.

So let's break this down. Why gaming going digital is a good thing? It's cheaper, it's easier and whether you want it or not, it's coming my friends.