Is physical ownership actually any better for game preservation?

[Spike0503]

G2ThaUNiT said:

For the most part, yes, but with some caveats that probably won't matter in the end for the most part. Current model of the PS5, for example, needs a one-time internet connection to activate the disc drive. Not exactly great when your disc drive one day dies and hoping the servers are running.

Hell, if PlayStation has an outage, no new purchasers will be able to activate the disc drive at that time lol.

I prefer GOG's means of preservation the most. Each game I buy from GOG, I download the game and put them on several different hard drives and my media server, just to be completely certain I'll never lose them. I've even sold them to friends for a few bucks lol. Sure I don't get the resell value and nice collection shelf, but at least I know for certain that I can never lose those games no matter what.

Take this with a grain of salt but I recently read that some new PS5 models being sold recently come with disc drives that already work without authentication. I don't know if it's every PS5 slim or how can you tell, but I read that from someone in a physical media discussion on reddit. They bought a new PS5 slim and they didn't have to authenticate.