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.
Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.
Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can’t nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let’s say we own the hard drive, that’s great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It’s unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.
I guess it’s not so much the discs I’m against (apart from the fact they do deteriorate faster than other types of storage) but the fact that there’s no option to retrieve and backup the data on said discs. Although saying that, most games require huge downloads to install anyway so is there even any benefit or security in ownership of physical media if it’s still useless without a significant download from a server than could theoretically cease to exist at any moment?
Well then I think your beef has nothing to do with the form of the media, but with DRM and lack of transferability. And I totally get the anxiety of having something and not wanting to lose access to it, but such is the nature of all games, movies, shows, books. Everything humans create has a shelf life and we’re in a neverending fight against entropy.
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Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.
Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can’t nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let’s say we own the hard drive, that’s great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It’s unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.
I guess it’s not so much the discs I’m against (apart from the fact they do deteriorate faster than other types of storage) but the fact that there’s no option to retrieve and backup the data on said discs. Although saying that, most games require huge downloads to install anyway so is there even any benefit or security in ownership of physical media if it’s still useless without a significant download from a server than could theoretically cease to exist at any moment?
Well then I think your beef has nothing to do with the form of the media, but with DRM and lack of transferability. And I totally get the anxiety of having something and not wanting to lose access to it, but such is the nature of all games, movies, shows, books. Everything humans create has a shelf life and we’re in a neverending fight against entropy.