Last month, November, was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales month what with Black Friday and all, November 2025 was the worst November in video game hardware unit sales, and the worst in physical software dollar sales the U.S. has seen since 1995.
I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
For all Steam’s faults…they host games forever it seems. A game I use to play was pulled from the storefront but stayed in your library(assuming you had it prior) because the publisher shut it all down back in 2017. I can still download and launch the game but the servers were gone so you couldn’t really play. Apparently pretty recently people found a way to get bootleg servers up so players were appearing as online again.
I’ll agree it’s still a point of failure if Steam just up and disappears but I’ve never had a game actually disappear from my library yet. Unlike basically every digital copy platform for movies (digital copy codes from physical copies). Just because you ‘own’ a digital movie doesn’t mean it won’t just vanish one day. iTunes will generally give you a couple bucks if you bring it to their attention that it’s gone but other platforms basically tell you to pound sand.
We basically have the exe issue with PC games on disc. I’ve got a few of those but most have been community patched so you just copy the cd contents, copy a file or two on top and launch the game for a modern os. Obviously some security risk here if those patched files are malicious.
It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can run the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 works too) on a 1440p monitor:
This is a 30 year old game!
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?
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I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
For all Steam’s faults…they host games forever it seems. A game I use to play was pulled from the storefront but stayed in your library(assuming you had it prior) because the publisher shut it all down back in 2017. I can still download and launch the game but the servers were gone so you couldn’t really play. Apparently pretty recently people found a way to get bootleg servers up so players were appearing as online again.
I’ll agree it’s still a point of failure if Steam just up and disappears but I’ve never had a game actually disappear from my library yet. Unlike basically every digital copy platform for movies (digital copy codes from physical copies). Just because you ‘own’ a digital movie doesn’t mean it won’t just vanish one day. iTunes will generally give you a couple bucks if you bring it to their attention that it’s gone but other platforms basically tell you to pound sand.
We basically have the exe issue with PC games on disc. I’ve got a few of those but most have been community patched so you just copy the cd contents, copy a file or two on top and launch the game for a modern os. Obviously some security risk here if those patched files are malicious.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can run the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 works too) on a 1440p monitor:
This is a 30 year old game!
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic digital media can’t exist because the data has to be stored on something physical eventually.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?