• I don’t doubt that digital is more accessible and readily available than other formats. The biggest problem is that few services allow me to download locally what I’ve purchased.

    So, for me, you’re not buying anything, you’re just renting for the long term.

    Honestly, I’m tired of buying digital only to suddenly find out I can no longer use what I purchased. For these services, I prefer self-hosting or any method that allows me to have a working copy locally. At least I can decide what to do with the digital content.

  • 7 hours

    Backups can always use all of these. Doesn’t matter how scrappy it is a couple of hard drives with a parity in running true as/freenas or just Debian with Mergerfs will last you a lot of years.

    Cassettes made a bit of a resurgence recently for audio cassettes though I would never want to return to those days for games.

    You don’t have to play their game just wait it out Sony and Xbox aren’t doing so hot financially ATM.

  • 16 hours

    Bluray is still alive and well because its the only format that has full quality basically 1:1 media encodes which ironically make up the backbone of full quality media piracy.

    No streaming service will ever support 70Gb+ file sizes because they never bothered to implement multicast so it would shred their bandwidth or rely on predownloading which would shred the tiny local storage included on most smart TVs.

    You could of course use jellyfin or any other file share protocol to DIY, but you’d better have a stable 100Mbps minimum upload/download speed lol.

  • My personal conspiracy theory is that Sony is trying to kill Blu-ray before it enters public domain. (2028-2030 or so). Single-layer Blu-rays are invaluable for my cold storage backups. So I’m going to keep buying them. And thanks to them, entering public domain, innovation will be possible once again. So, in all honesty, I don’t have that much to fear, as mega corporations also use blu-rays heavily for backups, together with tape.

    • 15 hours

      How’s the long-term stability of Blu-Ray? I know we’re running into problems with magnetic tape and CDs degrading.

      • Magnetic tape depolarizes over time. CDs were organic and they would literally rot away. But as long as your Blu-ray discs are high to low (HTL)/inorganic Then you’re really set for at least 30 years as well, just like professional tape, but at a fraction of the price.

      • 15 hours

        There’s M-Discs which are supposed to last 100 years I’ve heard.

  • 15 hours

    I know that’s not what you meant… But those are all digital…

    • 11 hours

      The only one that is not a digital medium is “digital”, because it is not a medium.

  • don’t worry, it will vanish soon and everything will be “in the clouds”

    aren’t you excited?

    • Definitive way to curb RAM prices, just use people’s brains.

      You could also sell part of your brain to openAI to offload part of their models for the cloud.

      It’s the matrix book but instead of cpu power is RAM storage.

    • You know, I haven’t tried requesting a video game through interlibrary loan and now I kind of want to just to try it. I love inter library loan

      • Hell, I want to try it now! Especially if you can find games that are generally rare at shops.

    • I have never been to a game shop with prices based in reality. They upcharge the hell out of their stuff and it’s insane.

      • You get lucky sometimes, but you’re right. Some shops are insane. It really depends on what you’re looking for.

      • Thrift stores used to be pretty good. It was a flat few dollars per game the last time I looked at them.

        • Yeah, used to. But people figured out years ago that old copies of pokemon go for 100€+ on ebay so they are basically hunting every thrift store or flea markets for elderly mothers who sell their sons stuff who moved out 10 years ago and hasn’t bothered picking his old stuff up.

    • 18 hours

      … all of them priced like brand new games. Some more expensive than their original retail price, thanks to inflation.

      At least that’s the case in my local used game shops.

      But that’s okay. I can find plenty of booty to plunder on the high seas.

      • Yeah, a lot of shops have gone off the rails with prices. The same thing happened with the vintage clothing market. All these folks started selling old shirts on eBay for like $50 minimum, and now all of the thrift stores are picked clean, or are selling those items at crazy prices themselves.

        I tend to get games that aren’t in the sought after list and get lucky sometimes. You can still find games at thrift stores if you’re lucky. You just have to hunt and be okay with disappointment lol.

      • 15 hours

        Less thanks to inflation and more due to scalpers who will buy them and flip them on ebay if they’re not

  • They still make CDs and Blu-Rays you know. The others are obsolete technologies.

    • And DVDs (movies get released as DVD, BR and UHD4K) and Floppies (New Amiga releases with a physical release) and Cartridges (evercade)

            • I think all games, even those in physical media, are licenses to play them, is what OP means. You might be thinking of download carts, which doesn’t contain game data, but makes you download games.

              • 11 hours

                Well yes that’s what I assumed they meant, a non-download cart wouldn’t be just a license, it would be the license and the game data

      • 19 hours

        I miss HDDVDs. Their better error correction will be missed more, soon, as this stuff degrades a bit.

    • Bluray is higher quality than all the streaming bullshit that’s usually lower than default settings x265. Also for anime the bluray is a great way to support the creator and used as a metric for deciding if a series gets picked up for more releases.

    • Both of those are dying unfortunately

      I like blurays but at some point we need go acknowledge the truth

  • All of these media are digital! Only digital is no medium but an encoding scheme.

    Currently used media are HDD and SSD.

  • Honestly 90% of the movies we want to watch aren’t on Prime (which we happen to have for non-movie-reasons) and we would need extra subscriptions for each of them. It is cheaper and more convenient for us to buy used blu rays or dvds of the movies. It’s 3,99€ to rent a movie for 48 hours (best case, usually it is some arthouse subscription) or 2,17€ for the DVD on medimops. We watch during lunch break so we usually can’t make it through a movie in 48 hours without stressing. (My spouse does not want to pirate anymore and I support that.)

    Our daughter has her own small collection of cartoons and anime that she can choose for a TV treat instead of scrolling through the endless void of the internet.

    I love booklets too much to ever let go of CDs.

    • I have been living the resurgence of vinyl. I’m not old, I just need large print liner notes.