Do you miss the days of physical games?

For instance, that feeling when you plop the disc into the tray, and hear it whirl inside?

Do you miss the smell of a freshly-bought, unsealed copy you just picked up at you local store?

Do you miss the cool menus that showed when you would plop the disc into the tray and it would show "install", "uninstall", and "settings"???

Would you like to return to those days?

In order: yes, no (because I still have a disc drive and discs :) ), yes, yes, YES.

I don't miss them, as they never really ended for me.

I miss the fun looking boxes that come in all shapes and sizes.

That sounds quite painful... 0.o

So what are your answers to those questions? You show yours, then I'll show mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjRNMmLjo6E

Hmm, this topic was run months ago
physical is bad, it is just useless trash and will end up in a whale belly killing it or something similar
we should ban them and burn the current copies to save the fish

Not really. I prefer digital, there's more place in my house. This year I sold almost every book I could buy in digital, I really hope I could replace them all. Of course I keep my best video games (BG, P:T, ID or Civilization) in Big Boxes, but that's just becasue of nostalgia. I'm happy all new games don't take any place in my house.

I made the differentiation because Blu-Ray movies are still the best and better than streaming.

Meanwhile physically recorded video games are pretty much dead. I started hating physically recorded video games when they started requiring you to actually constantly keep the disc in the tray to play the game. This was really infuriating. Why do I need to search for the "Play" disc of a game whenever I just want to play it? It actually caused me to lose many discs. Say, i want to play game X, but I cant find the box for the game Y that's already in the tray. So I put game Y somewhere out of sight, until I find the box. And then, someone of my family will move it, or I will forget where I tugged it away, and It'll take me months to find the disc and play the game again.

Plus, I have a bad memory from my childhood when I took a game from my cousin (who didn't want it anymore) and I destroyed it while taking it out of the disc holder.

So, don't force me to keep the play disc in the tray, and don't make stupidly inconvenient disc holders, and I wouldn't even mind physical recorded games today.

Of course, GOG is the best, but physical is better than Steam.

no

Same here. I still have a BD-RE drive partly to play DVD / Blu-Ray's, and partly for the many games that were never sold via online distribution in the first place.

Back when physical media games were popular, it was quite common to download "NoCD's" (small 'cracks' that removed / bypassed simple disc checks). Piracy aside, there were many valid reasons for legal owners to use them including protecting discs from wear & tear, playing games on laptops with no optical drive, and making a backup of a disc. I sourced NoCD's for all my disc games as soon as I got them at the time, and 15-30 years on those games still work flawlessly on the same W10 that broke the same games for everyone who blindly relied on DRM working forever.

Yes. If I had my way all game purchases could be made digitally with the option of a boxed, sealed copy -- with a manual -- sent to your doorstep.

I agree with this.

So from Day 1 then. Early CD-ROM games required the disc to be in the drive because they didn't have a full install option (unsurprising when in the early 1990s the average HDD was around 250MB). When HDDs got larger, they then started putting anti-theft devices on the CDs, requiring them to be in the drives.

100% this. I'd recommend anyone with a sizeable physical media collection to do the same - nearly everything still works with a bit of tinkering.