tomhoffa: I forgot to mention what i didnot like about physical copies.
how some of my games and music CD's mysteriously disappeard!?! Hmmmm...strange

tomhoffa: well obviously the later, no doubt lol

dogwhelk: Sometimes even copy protection was awesome.

teceem: Sure, and some diseases are also cool to have! Please elaborate why a copy protection is more awesome than none at all?

teceem: Sure, and some diseases are also cool to have! Please elaborate why a copy protection is more awesome than none at all?

jepsen1977: I can sometimes miss the entire process of going to a store, roaming through all the PC games and reading the PR speak at the back of the box, picking a one or a few and then taking it home to install and then finally to play (after patching). Once you made it to the main menu it felt earned when you actually played it.

Looking at the boxes can be nice but mostly I don't miss it. I've always focused most on the content of books, music, movies, and games. I'm happy with a cheap paperback version of a great novel or just an ebook and buying the expensive hardback edition with the glowing cover doesn't add anything for me.

Preservation IS an issue but none of my VHS tapes or cassette tapes have survived the test of time and neither the players needed to play those formats. You can't step into the same river twice because everything changes. I try to preserve what I can of popular media but if I lose access to a game or movie then I can survive without it.

That's the transitory nature of everything.

Crosmando: I think there's a vanity thing with having bookshelves full of games/books for people to see (so people think you're intelligent/cool) when in your apartment/house, regardless of whether you've even played or read everything on your shelves. Reminds me of all those midwit pseudo-intellectuals on youtube who record their videos with bookshelves full of "good" novels in the background so people will think they're so intelligent.

Crosmando: I think there's a vanity thing with having bookshelves full of games/books for people to see (so people think you're intelligent/cool) when in your apartment/house, regardless of whether you've even played or read everything on your shelves. Reminds me of all those midwit pseudo-intellectuals on youtube who record their videos with bookshelves full of "good" novels in the background so people will think they're so intelligent.

Timboli: That might be true of some, but debatable.

Where do you keep such boxes, if not on a shelf .... buried away somewhere perhaps?
There can be many reasons to leave them out on display ... admire artwork, initiate discussions, show an aspect of yourself that others may have no inkling of, make the most of the money you've spent, ease of access, etc.

Personally I love the look of filled bookshelves, even more than artwork. They give character and a homely feel, and a sense of achievement and richness. In some ways they are like a diary.

That said, many of my bookshelves are hidden behind other things (couches, etc) and many shelves are two or more layers deep with books or other media.

Like most, I don't post images or videos of myself, and these days I predominantly collect digital media which only appear on virtual bookshelves ... if even that. All about convenience and lack of space and the desire for less clutter.

But for those who do post such things online, surely it is only natural that the background would have such bookcases in many cases.

AB2012: I've never been into paying a lot for art / putting a box on a shelf or empty cardboard boxes (they do fetch a high price on Ebay for collectors of old out of print games though). Discs do have the advantage of permanence though, ie, if a dev wants to make an undesirable change / needs to remove a soundtrack for expired license reasons, the disc will always remain the same unlike updating the GOG version whilst simultaneously removing the older version from re-download for non-client users...) I think the real problem is the sheer number of non-update updates GOG puts out (ie, "updated installer structure, no changes to game files") usually involving changing the structure of the installer for some reason related to Galaxy.

I do own a BD-R drive and can (and have) made an optical backup of older "finished" games that have "settled down" for pretty much the same result. And whilst the GOG Covers site is awesome (maintained by user dawnpatrol) for those who want to do their own, I tend to not print such artwork due to backing up a lot more than just 1 game per disc. Eg, games like Avadon or VVVVVV that take up barely 100MB each, you can fit over 200x of those onto 1x BD-R which takes up a lot less room than 200x discs for 200x games. Take it one step further and store those discs on a spindle or high capacity 6x disc DVD case vs individual case with 1x disc each, and you're looking at over 1,000x such smaller games stored in the width of 1x case. That's a lot of space saved.

So short answer is, I do still use optical as a "tertiary" archival backup format (in addition to HDD's), but I store them in a space-efficient archival manner rather than how a "collector" looks to showcase them on a shelf with box & artwork.