Paying more to play a game a week in advance

Digital only.
Streaming
Huge patched to fix a broken launched game
Microtransactions
Dlc that are overpriced
Live service games

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.

People will try to say that modern discs are just download codes but doesitplay.org shows that plenty of single player games are perfectly playable on disc, with no Internet connection required. There may be some minor bugs here and there but most people never notice them. They are just as complete as old PS2 and GameCube games at launch.

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.

Yes, digital is the only way to preserve games

However platform-locked stores is not the way to do it. Even if I download my collection in HD/SDs it's judt too tiresome to keep checking if they were all functional and not corrupted and that's to no say the amount of money I need to pay for storage if I want to place them in some cloud

Servers with files, upgrades, patches and DLC should always be online. I don't care if this costs platform holders money, it's their bussines it should be their cost

Those were CD-Rs and DVD-Rs being written to in your 2009 study. Not professionally stamped disks.

We know how many copies of certain games sold and there are mathematical ways to get accurate population estimates without having to count every last game. Conservationists use these methods to estimate wildlife numbers. If only a small fraction of Super Mario Bros. for example had survived the game wouldn't be readily available in every game shop on earth in hilarious overstock numbers.

Physical has been proven to keep games around for over 100 years and I don't need a company to keep my collection in good shape. The emulation and piracy community has done little so far to save critically acclaimed games. Name an important, critically acclaimed game that was saved by emulation or piracy. I don't care if Barbie Horse Adventures can't be played in 20 more years. Software emulators can easily offer up an incomplete and inaccurate experience, for those too lazy to do due diligence. Roms from piracy sites are frequently incorrect. People who haven't touched physical hardware in decades like to claim that all emulators are accurate but they simply don't have a reference point. They also don't bother to do stringent testing.

Don't get me wrong. Many emulators are great and work just fine. Especially when using crt-royale. But to claim that software emulation is some sort of panacea for game preservation is misguided. Dreamcast emulation has miles yet to go. Nintendo DS has a specific pixel density that computer emulators get wrong. 3DS can't get the 3D aspect correct on an emulator. The touch aspects of DS and 3DS games are poor or non-existent on emulators. Vetrex games look and feel entirely different on actual hardware due to using an oscilloscope.

The idea that "digital is the only way to preserve games" is just an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Most people don't want to collect or bother with original hardware. Most people don't know anything about the hobby and make entirely wrong assumptions. For example: Many people assume that Famicom disk system games don't work, based on how fragile floppy discs in office areas were. After all those floppy discs all failed in offices decades ago. Yet the FDS games are still readable because Nintendo used better materials. There's countless examples like this where real world experience in the hobby trumps internet assumptions. Name a system that sold over 5 million units and I can help you build a good collection of 50 titles for less than what they sold for at original retail. NES, Genesis, and SNES are all cheap if you know what games to look for.

Platform-locked stores are terrible and I absolutely agree that if you buy a game you should have access to it forever as long as your hardware works. This is why I buy physical though. All my DS games still work. I can't buy those games from Nintendo's online store and I no longer have my original DS. If I had bought them digitally they would all be gone now.

I'll make some arguments as to why MTX are the biggest rip-off in gaming in a few days. Long story short they cost practically nothing to produce, affect your experience in critical ways, and make the archival of many games a nightmare.

No new F-Zero, Star Fox, nor Earthbound on Nintendo Switch.

A small fraction of Super Mario Bros. can still be millions of units considering how well that game sold. Hardly proof of anything.

Physical will only be 'proven' to last anything when they get there. After all, no durability study can properly encompass what happens with time given the myriad forms that phase transition and degradation can take place in these materials.

And it seems a bit disingenuous to think there will be readily available replacement parts for actual console hardware 50-100 years from now but emulation will still be largely feature-incomplete.

We can emulate 4th-generation consoles and earlier with literal 100% accuracy nowadays. In time the same will be true for more recent hardware. Meanwhile, things like CRT and Betamax already have to contend with a shrinking pool of replacement parts since no new ones are being produced less than 20 years after being discontinued. Imagine that for more obscure or niche console tech a thousand times over.