I bought a pair of 20Tb HDD's for my Xbox Series X.

Unfortunately the console will only detect 16Tb drives, even partitioning the drives into 10Tb sections didn't trick the console... So those drives ended up on my PC and I ended up buying a pair of 16TB drives instead.

Consoles just lack the flexibility.

I am able to easily maintain 250MB/s transferring over to the internal SSD, which means for your average game it will take 5 minutes to transfer over... Which is far more preferable than installing+updating which can take several hours... Especially with some updates being 50-100GB.

As for optical disks... I guess they could work with compression and multiple-disks, but pigs would fly before then, these days.

You need to mod your device to enable 'homebrew' and illegal pirating to preserve your digital library.

Once they stop selling physical, you can buy a second-hand copy, you can't do that with digital.

Again. Second hand.

The DS and even more so with the 3DS... They are fairly unique gaming platforms having multiple displays, one involving touch which means it's difficult/unappealing to emulate those games on other platforms.

Unfortunately the digital stores no longer exist for those platforms, which means second hand physical is your best choice.

Or... I can drop in a movie disc from the 1990's without having to stress about expired digital licences and having that movie removed from a streaming service indefinitely.

For example... StarGate SG-1 is one of my favorite TV shows, Amazon has "upscaled" the original DVD which means characters have a paste-y look to their skin which just doesn't look right... Some of the episodes were also messed up and in the wrong order... And they have removed the series from the streaming service a few times due to rights issues.

Physical media is true preservation, not whatever excuse you are making.

I think physical games will remain. Sure, the console manufacturers and publishers want everbody to buy digital because it makes them the most profit. However, when we are at a point when 90% of people buying digital anyway, they don't really lose anything if they offer an optional disk drive for those 10% hardcore collectors. To keep their voices quiet and offer them what they want (i.e. physical media) will give the console manufacturers better PR than having those hardcores against them.

I also think that games on store shelves are welcome additional avertising. Honestly, avertising on e-shops have their limits. You can do promotions and special attentions all you want, there are simply too many games available in e-shops, they simply get forgotten. However, physical stores have limited space and therefore certain games can shine brighter on shelves than in the digital nirvana. Additionally, the bargain bins give attention to games that are long forgotten.

Another interesting development is the company Blaze with its divers retro consoles with physical media: Evercade, Capcom and Taito Superpocket, etc. It seems that their whole business strategy is built on retro consoles with physical media. I hope they will be successful.

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 

Preservation = How the game can be available for posteriority 

Physical needs the game, album or movie to be extremely popular to be truly "preserved" i.e. have enough printing to exist in second hand market for decades. There are countless movies and albums I was only able to listen and watch thanks to digital. 

I think you misunderstood what I meant about losing my DS and PS2 libraries. The physical copies still exists, but they are literally unplayable because there is no functional hardware to play them. I can only play some PS2 games that I have bought again on Switch or PS4. Again, digitally

My local store has plenty DS and PS2's for sale. Heck you can find them at garage sales. It's not rare hardware, I have a couple PS2's still around the house and they still work fine. And doesn't 3DS play DS titles as well?

Preservation is conserving the original work, not some copy. I can download a picture of the Mona Lisa, does that mean I'm preserving it?

There are plenty real collectors around to preserve the real deal. Digital copies of popular games is not preservation. It's up to the developer to preserve the source code though, as well as the schematics for the hardware. You can't write an emulator if the details about the original hardware are lost...

What you are describing is the exact opposite of "perfect backwards compatibility".  Either I have a different VM for every past version of Windows or build an era-correct PC for every era.  That isn't perfect backwards compatibility at all.

I should just go around saying "consoles have perfect backwards compatibility.  All I have to do is buy the right console for each library of games and bobs your uncle.  Perfect backwards compatibility."

The closest any device actually came to "perfect backwards compatibility" was the Wii.  It could play games from NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, and Wii eras and even some Genesis and TG16 games.  Most importantly, this was all easy to use.  (I didn't have to hack my Wii or set up a VM to make it happen.)  It had the appearance of perfect backwards compatibility.  However when they closed the Virtual Console, that destroyed the idea we could actually ever have perfect backwards compatibility.  That is what is needed though, an easy to use system that can play any game.

Now that the VC is closed, Steam or gog.com is probably the closest we have to "perfect backwards compatibility".  I consider their account systems to be more reliable than Nintendo or Playstation.

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.

And obviously supply/demand pressures will exert itself over the following decades, meaning your game purchases actually increase in value... Can't really resell your digital games to another person.

You can play PS2 games on the PS3.

You can play DS games on the 3DS.

Both of those consoles have newer platforms you can play those games on.

And the original consoles still exist in the second hand marketplace... In-fact the PS2 is the worst console as there were 150~ million of those devices sold.

VM is a software layer. It allows old software to run on new hardware. Perfectly. And once set-up is extremely seamless.
And you don't need a dozen different VM's for different hardware/software configurations. - Just one for Win9x running Voodoo+Geforce... That gives you full DOS compatibility as well.
NT and newer based games (Think: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 10) run without issue on Windows 11.

And unlike consoles, you don't need a dozen different pieces of hardware.

The Wii wasn't "perfect backwards compatibility". - The NES, SNES, N64 were emulated and the entire software libraries didn't exist on the Wii.

Perfect backwards compatibility is ironically the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X as they share the same x86/Radeon hardware base as their predecessors, negating the need for any kind of emulation, just clever abstraction - and virtualization in the OG Xbox/Xbox 360's case.

Software libraries need to be carried forwards in the digital world. - We have that with the current Xbox and Playstation consoles, but will that continue for next-gen? Nintendo broke backwards compatibility with the WiiU and 3DS... Which reinforces the idea that it's never a guarantee.

I'm nearing 1000 games in my physical collection. Plenty of great games not well-known have never been ported to anything else. Physical or digital. I have physical games you can no longer buy digitally. Xenoblade X for example. Then odd things like sure you can play Ocarina on Switch but can you play the original unedited release? Mine had red blood and different music in the fire temple. My copy of Mario 64 has Mario saying So Long Eh Bowser. NFL Blitz re-release removed tackles after a play. The best version of Sonic Adventure is still only on Dreamcast. Every port has been the terrible Gamecube revision. Emulation exists but it's a copy of a copy so sometimes it sucks and still missing a lot of games.  Some good games can't be resold due to licenses. Glad I can still play WWF No Mercy. Wolf Fang. Bulk Slash.

FPGA clone consoles are becoming more common so even if older consoles start becoming really hard to find. Still hardware options for a lot of consoles and more are coming.

Thats like asking if the sun going to die. I mean eventually it has to right, but not for the foreseeable future i'd guess.

Nice.  Just need about half a dozen of those and 4 power strips to handle all those AC adapters....  sounds so much better than retroarch.  

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