How Will You Buy Your Vita Games, Retail or Download?

With early start Vita bundle buyers picking up their systems this morning in the U.S., commenter bassguygt is curious to know how they’ll be picking up games, and frankly so are we.

I’m wondering how many Vita early adopters are choosing to buy their games in retail vs. digital PSN download format. I know that there are pros and cons of each. I’ve been leaning toward digital for convenience, but if I go digital, I’ll go “all in” and get either the 16 or 32 gig card, which will cost me several tens of dollars I could otherwise spend on games for the Vita (and heck, money doesn’t grow on trees, right?).

Going digital is more convenient (no going to a store, no changing game cards), it promotes the movement towards 100% digital distribution for video games (which I think is a plus), and it gives you the opportunity to carry a good portion/all of your Vita games library with you without having to have a separate carry case for game cards.

On the negative side, you have to buy a very expensive memory card (realistically 16GB or 32GB if you want to carry several games with you), and the ~10% discount for digital download games won’t come close to recovering the cost of the memory card unless you buy a great number of games.

Retail games are often cheaper due to the seemingly more frequent sales of retailers such as Amazon, and you “actually own” them (which is a whole different debate; I’ll just leave it at that). But you still need to buy a memory card (albeit a smaller one) and you have to carry all the various game cards around with you (which I really dislike if you haven’t picked up on that already).

There are probably other pros and cons of each I’m not thinking of…but I’d like to know how many of those who are definitely buying a Vita near launch are going to:

a) Go 100% digital for game purchases

b) Go 100% retail

c) Some combination of retail/digital.

(Editor’s Note: Hey look, a poll!)

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