Oh they are into those now as well (12 and 14 now). I meant when they were 4 and 6, discovering video games through the tactile experience. Already at 2-3 years old getting a kick out of crashing the plane in Wii sports resort, feeling the rumble as the pilot jumps out. That look of joy and wonder on their face is priceless.

Now they're old and just play whatever you tube tells them to play :/ 14 year old is into Rust and Rocket League, 12 year old wants to play GTA 5 and is configuring the color sequences on his new keyboard. BotW uses motion controls btw, still need that tactile part ;)
They grew up too fast, perverted by you tube streamers! Yet the youngest still wants to play 1-2-Switch now and then. How will that be preserved digital only...

You don't have to hunt down old discontinued used consoles.  There is always stuff like this that pops up from different manufacturers. 

I didn't put further context for my decision; for major games where I know it's cheaper physical, I'll go physical all the time. Indies is a different story; I know most are digital for a good reason, and I'm fine with going for them digitally because there's no other way I can play them.

I credit Rayman legends on the switch for my kids getting into games.  I would play with a pro controller while they used their finger to make the glums worth more.  That and they played coop Mario galaxy collecting star bits.  

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.

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.

This is completely irrelevant to my point. Hardware stop being produced and console physical games are tied to platforms. Console stop being produced in a very short time, less than 10 years indeed. Which means that yes EVERY physical copy will be soon or later be rendered useless simply because there will be no way to play them 

This is similar to how VHS movie collections are absolutely dead as there are no VHS players in the market for many years now. Consoles being closed platforms mean that every generation is a reset, except when the company decides to backward compatibility route which extends the shelf life of the physical copy for two generations 

In a physical only world this means that during PS6, PS7 and PS8 times the only way to play PS1 and PS2 games is counting with the goodwill of the company to keep re-releasing and printing the same games again and again. With years and decades this means company would need to print regularly dozens of thousands of games because every generation there will be a huge amount of new games being released that will need to be added to the printing stack 

Such issue does not exist with digital. Bar the VERY uncommon cases of a company purposefully shutting down their own games. This happens in other industries as well, Disney refuses to sell the Sound of South because of its racist undertones, otherwise every movie of them is on Disney Plus. There is nothing to be concerned with digital stores. If anything they will made games much less likely dissappear

Anyway my Intellivision is now over 40 years old, all games still work. The controllers still work. Just a pita to hook it up to modern tvs. ROM cartridges and CDs last a long time, sadly my 5.25" and 3.5" floppy disks are pretty much worthless, as well as games that came on tape. Magnetic media lasts the shortest, hence HDDs being so fragile. SSD I don't know, my old (write-able) memory cards are all failing so not too optimistic about SSD drives either :/

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 

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