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Forums - Sony - PS3 and PS Vita stores no longer closing

Mandalore76 on 23 March 2021
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):



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PotentHerbs on 23 March 2021

It doesn't impact me but it shows the danger of an digital future. I've come around on buying games digitally but this was one of the concerns I had.



Conina on 23 March 2021
haxxiy said:

I don't understand, you guys thought it would remain open forever?

It's not like books, CDs, films, physical games themselves, etc. are in print forever either. And bought copies of these will inevitably decay so the risk is just the same if not greater than the servers of a digital product shutting down.

It's not like they are running out of shelf space so the older digital games have to make room for the newer digital games.

And since most older PS3 games, the PS3-indie games, the Vita games, the PSP games, the PS1 classics for PS3/PSP/Vita and the PS2 classics for PS3 are quite small, it should be a no-brainer to keep them in the store, if someone still wants to pay $5 - $10 for them.

Especially, if they keep the data for redownloads anyways.

Most of PC games added to Steam since 2003 are still in the Steam store.

Most of PC games added to GOG.com since 2008 are still in the GOG store.



JWeinCom on 23 March 2021
Mandalore76 said:
haxxiy said:

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):

No way that copy of Zelda is functioning. Save battery has to be long dead. 

Also, first time I ever have seen what a colecovision cartridge looks like.



Leynos on 23 March 2021
JWeinCom said:
Mandalore76 said:

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):

No way that copy of Zelda is functioning. Save battery has to be long dead. 

Also, first time I ever have seen what a colecovision cartridge looks like.

My copy of Super Mario World on SNES still has all the saves on it from 30 years ago somehow.



Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

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Conina on 23 March 2021
JWeinCom said:
Mandalore76 said:

Colecovision Digital Data Pack (37 years old): 

Also, first time I ever have seen what a colecovision cartridge looks like.

That is no cartridge but a normal cassette tape for the Coleco Adam home computer.

C64 had similar data tapes until the floppy drives got popular.

Or the audio tapes for Sony's Walkman.

And this was the essential tool for these cassettes:



JWeinCom on 23 March 2021
Conina said:
JWeinCom said:

Also, first time I ever have seen what a colecovision cartridge looks like.

That is no cartridge but a normal cassette tape for the Coleco Adam home computer.

C64 had similar data tapes until the floppy drives got popular.

Or the audio tapes for Sony's Walkman.

And this was the essential tool for these cassettes:

Lol. I'm old enough to remember cassettes. Just never knew they had games on them.



Conina on 23 March 2021
JWeinCom said:
Conina said:

That is no cartridge but a normal cassette tape for the Coleco Adam home computer.

C64 had similar data tapes until the floppy drives got popular.

Or the audio tapes for Sony's Walkman.

And this was the essential tool for these cassettes:

Lol. I'm old enough to remember cassettes. Just never knew they had games on them.

It was much cheaper than floppy discs or cartridges, so most 8-bit home computers used them:



JWeinCom on 23 March 2021
Conina said:
JWeinCom said:

Lol. I'm old enough to remember cassettes. Just never knew they had games on them.

It was much cheaper than floppy discs or cartridges, so most 8-bit home computers used them:

Interesting. You learn something new everyday. I wouldn't think cassettes would lend themselves to that. Didn't think they could access a particular part of the game as needed. But I guess it does work.



mjk45 on 23 March 2021
JWeinCom said:
Mandalore76 said:

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):

No way that copy of Zelda is functioning. Save battery has to be long dead. 

Also, first time I ever have seen what a colecovision cartridge looks like.

Due to this giving me a flashback about tape loading I can attest that the ColecoVision tape is after 37 years still in the middle of loading the game and we wont know how long it takes since we aren't immortal.



Research shows Video games  help make you smarter, so why am I an idiot