Are physical games eventually going to die?

[IcaroRibeiro]

SvennoJ said:

IcaroRibeiro said:

But for how long? I mean, my PS2 was presenting malfunction after less than 10 years of use. It's clear hardware has expiration date. In 30 years those piece of hardware will be relics and the amount of physical copies will be absolutely useless for most of customers

 We seems to have different definitions of preservation. Preservation for me means making it available to posteriority. Physical games of consoles are just a piece of plastic with no use whatsoever if you can't run the source code. Digital copies are clearly the only feasible way to make games from our generation available for our grandkids 

Do you have kids? Kids are interested in the tactile experience. My kids loved playing with all the old consoles, their interest in old games started based on the hardware. I want to play with that controller daddy (gamecube) so I hooked the gamecube back up and they enjoyed the games on it. Then they got into ps2 and the funky looking Intellivision. The voice module was a big hit. I wish I still had a Vectrex, that's a true magical marvel, hopefully it will be remade at some point (that is if the hardware schematics have been preserved) but you can still find them if looking hard enough.

Old digital games in a menu on my PC, zero interest. So I'm sorry to pop your balloon of presenting your grand kids with a vast digital library, that's not how kids get excited about things. Mine were all over our 90's Gameboys we still had lying around. Couple fresh batteries, and off they went playing Mario games on the gameboy. Tons of fun. Zero interest in playing them in the virtual console.

We grow up tasting everything first, mouth is your primary tool, then hands, brain comes last. Digital is great for nostalgia, irrelevant for growing up. VR has a much better chance to appeal to kids (it does) but the Wii motes were the biggest success for when they were toddlers, as well as eye toy / kinect, DDR dance mats, light guns, Move sharpshooter. Just copying digital games is not preservation, it's merely feeding your nostalgia. It's only part of the experience.

I only have cousins (who treats me as uncle because kf the age gap, I'm ~20 years older than some of them). What you say about physicals is true that's why they starting reading my physical manga collections as well as my books, and also played my 3DS (I generally donate my older consoles to them)

However one of them broke my 3DS and can no longer play the games, neither can I. My games are gone. So what he can do? Well, nothing really. But emulation can make them play the same games in future

There are many games from the 80s and 90s that I never played except by digital means, either by emulation of by buying digital versions on later consoles. 

This discussion remember me when I wanted to read The Wheel of Time around ~12 years ago and couldn't find any physical copy in my language on bookstores (it's a serie that went out of print many years agora and you vould only find books 1 and 2 and barely). That led me to holding of and stopping in the second book for almost a decade until the series got a TV show and made me remember that I never really read it trough it. I bought it digitally for my Kindle and boom, problem solved. I believe you can find up to the book 8 in portuguese now physically thanks to the TV show, but before it? Forget it. That's how can physical can lead it