My top five are Persona 4 Golden, Divinity Original Sin II, Divinity Original Sin, Hollowknight Silksong and Balatro. I was expecting Helldivers 2 in my top this yeae so was a little surprised by its absence.

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?

I thought we were MAYBE heading that way in the days of iTunes but then the oh-so-convenient streaming came along and entirely killed the majority’s desire to actually own movies.

At least music is a medium that managed to transition to DRM-free digital storefronts, even if it is barely used.

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.

This will probably be a controversial take but physical media shouldn’t exist in 2025.

Ownership of games SHOULD exist and so should multiple competing store fronts. We need to normalise DRM free digital copies rather than ewaste blu-ray discs that’ll one day degrade and become useless.

This is generally my view on Android handhelds but for some reason N64 emulation simply refuses to work on my Fairphone 6 so I’ve ordered a Mangmi instead.