PS3 and PS Vita stores no longer closing

[Mandalore76]

haxxiy said:

Mandalore76 said:

Physical media may not have an infinite lifespan, but to say the risk of physical media "decaying" is the "the same if not greater" than a digital server being closed is laughable.  The physical media (books, comics, football cards, toys, board games, etc.) that I have collected throughout my life can be passed on to relatives to enjoy long after I'm gone.  I still have working carts and consoles from the 2nd Generation of video games (Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision) which are 40+ years old at this point.  I wouldn't call that the "same if not greater" risk when compared to losing all of your games if they happened to be digitally tied to a system that might fail at some point after the storefront has closed.

That's anecdotal evidence. What you are reporting is the exception, not the rule.

Virtually all recorded CDs, DVDs, magnetic tapes, and cassettes will be gone after 40+ years since their average lifespan is just a fraction of that. Even the ROM modules inside older cartridges will have a hard time lasting that long because even though they are hardware encoded and can't be electronically changed, the transistors themselves can and will eventually fail, no matter how much care you put into it.

Most PS1 disks are rotting already. In 15 - 20 years, a lot of Switch cartridges will no longer be functional. And so on.

You really believe Switch cartridges will no longer be functional in less than 2 decades?  When it is still easy to find working copies of all of these games?:

Nintendo DS cartridge (15 years old): 

Nintendo 64 cartridge (25 years old): 

NES cartridge (35 years old): 

Colecovision Digital Data Pack (37 years old): 

ColecoVision Cartridge (39 years old):