Are physical games eventually going to die?

[IcaroRibeiro]

Pemalite said:

IcaroRibeiro said:

Buying second hand is literally the opposite of preservation. It means someone needs to given up their copy to other people to get the copy. With time those copies will suffer malfunction and will literally dissappear. Worse, being tied to specific hardware to will be unplayable regardless of how many time the copies endure 

NES/SNES/N64 carts last (have lasted) decades as it's ROM.

Optical discs are hit and miss... Disc rot is a real issue with CD's on the PS1 and early DVD's, but not much of an issue these days.

If you have physical media, if your console dies, you can buy another second hand console and keep playing your games, all your eggs are  not in a single basket.

This is completely irrelevant to my point. Hardware stop being produced and console physical games are tied to platforms. Console stop being produced in a very short time, less than 10 years indeed. Which means that yes EVERY physical copy will be soon or later be rendered useless simply because there will be no way to play them 

This is similar to how VHS movie collections are absolutely dead as there are no VHS players in the market for many years now. Consoles being closed platforms mean that every generation is a reset, except when the company decides to backward compatibility route which extends the shelf life of the physical copy for two generations 

In a physical only world this means that during PS6, PS7 and PS8 times the only way to play PS1 and PS2 games is counting with the goodwill of the company to keep re-releasing and printing the same games again and again. With years and decades this means company would need to print regularly dozens of thousands of games because every generation there will be a huge amount of new games being released that will need to be added to the printing stack 

This is not realistic of course and would lend to an industry where only the most popular games would get regular prints every generation where the less successful games will just be forgotten 

Such issue does not exist with digital. Bar the VERY uncommon cases of a company purposefully shutting down their own games. This happens in other industries as well, Disney refuses to sell the Sound of South because of its racist undertones, otherwise every movie of them is on Disney Plus. There is nothing to be concerned with digital stores. If anything they will made games much less likely dissappear