What is the biggest scam in the gaming industry?

[haxxiy]

Cerebralbore101 said:

Microtransactions.

As far as physical games go, the library of Congress did a study on how long your average disc will last. They concluded that 70% of discs would still be readable after 70 years. Switch game carts will last up to 20 years. Old game carts from before 2004 are borderline immortal.

It depends on the study - a 2009 one from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division had all optical media fail in an accelerated aging test and concluded they're unlikely to last more than 25 years on average.

There will be a lot of survivor bias here too - you might think there's a lot of Atari cartridges or w/e still functioning but that's a small fraction of all that were ever produced. Some of those no longer existing absolutely might have suffered masked ROM failure 40 years later.

Digital is the way games will be preserved forever, and not at the hands of the companies. As taboo as it is and as much as many people don't like it, the emulation and piracy community has done more for game preservation than anything else ever will.

While those folks with enormous physical collections that they won't ever play again will have lost most of them by the time they're old, the games will still be available online.