I've said it to death, but drm-free digital.

Better for the environment, no clutter in my house (I don't have the heart to throw away those fancy game boxes and they do take room, I'm glad the digital transition happened when it did, otherwise they might have had to classify me a hoarder), easier to preserve with a modest amount of knowledge (well, went all geeky and set myself up a multi-machine home ceph cluster, but that's me, you can go simpler) if you measure preservation in the span of decades where the decay of physical media is a factor.

That is my stance on it in a nutshell.
I have never really understood the 'digital versus physical' debate - discs and cartridges can have DRM on them (remember Starforce/the Sony rootkit?), while GOG's installers can be copied from drive to drive without restriction, which makes them perfect for my own preservation efforts via external HDs plus a backup drive.

Also, I really do not miss the noise of optical drives - if I wanted to feel as if I lived next to an airport, I would move to one, and get actual planes with the acoustics.

Just that it means it is personal opinion, and nothing 'natrually' about it all, which you confirmed. So, thank you for agreeing with me.

That's just like...your opinion, man.

See? Much shorter way of saying the same. ;)

Both.

Nice to have a game in full on disc w/ the manual and all of that. Then cut an extra CD or DVD w/ patches, saves, mods, etc.

I don't miss Disc-DRM though - StarForce, SafeDisc, Tages, and Securom were all "meh."

But, I really miss the old days of burning games to CD/DVD from GOG, all DRM-FREE.
And also do the same w/ with all patches, mods, my saves, etc - all DRM-free.

Sure, sticking them on HDD's and SSD's is fine and all - but, I miss the old days. We need a newer format like a bigger BDXL-Super or something, when you got newer games like newer COD's and ARK eating 200-300GB - and that format would need to be fast w/ dealing w/ all this big file-size, too.

I get the appeal of burning everything to a disc, but wouldn't doing it that way just add another cost on top of what you are already paying for a game? At least HDDs and SSDs are much more versatile and flexible storage mediums, while optical discs are typically used for only one thing. Blu-rays are also much more expensive.

I like both, but I'll always put physical media first. The benefits surpass DRM free downloads in my opinion.

-At least here in Portugal, physical copies are almost always cheaper than digital copies.
-There's an actual value to the product you buy, which means you can get that value back if you ever need to sell it.
-Disc encryption or DRM is always inevitably bypassed, which means you get both things in one: you get a physical copy, as well as your own DRM free backup.
-Optical media is a superior form of long term storage, with a much bigger average and potential lifespan compared to HDD's, which is where most people store their GOG installers.
-Having an actual item just freaking rocks overall, as well as the extra goodies, like manuals, stickers, etc.

I prefer the digital DRM-free now, but I do consider the current forms lacking a little. They're usually pre-tweaked, don't contain any base-release content, now often don't come with extras as standard, etc.

Digital DRM-free (in particular GOG's) installers could be done far better, but at the moment the sheer convenience of having the installers archived ready to access and install trumps having to baby a disc for its lifecycle, and have to laboriously insert and remove (potentially several discs) and wait long installation times just to get a game going.

As for boxes on shelves I've got quite enough collectible stuff cluttering up the house to have to keep game boxes around. They're pretty for sure, but they're dust and mould collectors and serve little but mere decoration.
On a solitary drive only? Perhaps. But most serious archivists move their files onto newer drives over time. Those who keep the original pressed copies of their games will eventually find their collection succumb to disc rot, if not accidental damage with use.

HDD's and SSD's don't and won't last forever though. We have to use them these days, since they're a lot cheaper than say buying BD-discs - but you do have a to keep an eye on these drives b/c you never know.

Yep. Many games from Steam era require Steam install, client, phone home/activation. Some games from Ubi require UPLAY (now UbiSoft Connection). I'm sure there's others too - like probably Diablo 3 with Battle.Net.

Also,StarForce is awful. That junk can wreck OS security and even your installed-OS. No thanks - better off with DRM-Free download for those games from GOG, provided they've been put on GOG.

Sure, it's true that you can be constantly switching HDD's overtime, meanwhile you can't do that with an original disc copy. However, during the time you were switching HDD's over the years, your disc copy is still fine. And if your disc copy does go bad, if you backed it up yourself, you can do that HDD replication process that you would do with your DRM free installers, which means you still own the game.

CD's are theoretically the least resistant to age of all optical media, yet original PS1 games, which are now 30 years old, are still widely available and fully functional.

Disc rot is a reality, but a way overblown one. It's not as common as it's thought to be. It was only an issue mostly on Sega Saturn discs, and a few other badly pressed CD's of that time. Nowadays, I'm not gonna say it's impossible to happen, but I'd say it's extremely hard.

You can use RAID to mitigate that by having multiple copies of your games stored across several HDDs / SSDs. It's far more scalable and future-proof than either using a single drive or an optical disc.
That's actually a pretty great argument for buying physical media. You can't really resell your game if you bought it digitally. Although, I think that's still outweighed by the ease of use, the ability to maintain easy backups and the much faster installation speeds of digital downloads.

I'm not only referring to CDs, but to larger media. If you haven't ever owned a large DVD or Blu-Ray collection I've got news for you: it's much more common than you'd think and although handling and storage does play a role sometimes it seems to be completely random. It's particularly bad for dual-layer discs.

As for the "but you digitally backup the physical copy itself"... you're basically saying "physical is better because you can make a digital backup in case of failure". Furthermore - depending on your jurisdiction and the terms of the licensing agreement such copying of the original media might be against the law.

If you want a physical copy because, well, it makes you feel all nice and sentimental about its ownership - I have no beef with that. But claiming the physical disc will last longer than the average digital file backup because you can make a digital copy of said disc is a little ass-backwards, isn't it?

This is why physical and digital is the right answer for me.

Want to back-up your digital files onto discs like CD, DVD, BR? Do it.
Want to back-up you digital files to hard drives like a mechanical HDD and/or SSD? Do it.
It's yours - either way.

Buy a game on disc and hopefully it got no junk DRM like StarForce? Great!
You'll likely need to back up save your patches, mods, etc somewhere on disc or hard drives.

Discs won't last forever and neither will HDD's/SSD's. I've had both discs and internal & external hard drives go, so.... [shrug]

Also, stores like Steam, GOG, Epic, etc won't last forever either. Steam's probably going to last longer than most b/c it's that popular on PC and b/c dev's and pub's will play ball with them b/c they allow for DRM and have their own schemes - so, it's great to also have access to our accounts w/ these digital stores while they are open like GOG, Steam, etc for as long as we can, so we can grab our files from them. Unfortunately, most dev's and pub's will use whatever optional DRM other stuffs have & allow on those other stores that aren't GOG - so when it comes to DRM-Free games with no activation, no required-client bullcrap, and no phone home/activation for single-player stuff; GOG's the best at this.

So, if you love certain games and they are on GOG DRM-FREE - make sure when it's on sale, buy it here. And back up your games so you got them, in case GOG goes away - same goes for other digital stores too, esp. if they got No DRM there.

I have around 300 physical games, mostly comprising PS2, PS3, PS4 and PS5 games, with a few PC games. All of them still work fine. I have a copy of NFS Most Wanted for the PS2 that I ruined as a kid, and not because of age, but it still reads sometimes.

I did indeed hear that movie discs sometimes do go bad out of the blue, but I was mainly focusing on game discs. And when it comes to games, it's a lot harder for it to happen for a simple reason: the game printing factories vary a lot less in quality compared to movie discs. Game discs are made in much better factories overall, while movies could be made just about anywhere. If you grab any PS2 disc (which is a DVD) and compare it to any movie DVD, you'll immediately notice the difference in quality.

Correct, and I do think it's a great point for physical media.

I'm not gonna argue too much here because I might say something that could be wrong. But as long as you're using said backed up copy for personal use exclusively, in most places you should be within the confines of the law. It's only when you distribute it without authorization that you're breaking the law.

In addition, a lot of GOG games are just installed physical copies without DRM, and some games here just straight up include a raw disc image of the game. For example, Tunnel B1 [url=]https://www.gog.com/en/game/tunnel_b1[/url] includes not only a disc rip of the DOS version of the game, but it also includes a proper redump.org grade dump of the PS1 version of the game. And GOG isn't breaking any laws here. So you shouldn't be either if you back up a disc for yourself while you still own said disc.

I didn't say that. I said that game discs last more than HDD's. If you copy over your game to a new HDD after a few years, it's a new HDD, so you can't really say your game lasted longer on your HDD, because it's a brand new HDD.

However, technically, once you back up your physical copy digitally, it can last as long as any frequently backed up DRM free copy.

That's like saying "I'd rather buy a pristine 2002 BMW with like 3000 km on it, rather than a totaled, rusty 1967 Ferrari with no engine on it". Only one is a viable choice, so the choice is obvious here (maybe the totaled Ferrari would still be worth more, but you get my point. Only the BMW can serve it's purpose). Even with a digital copy, the problem you're facing with BF3 remains the same, so physical or digital is irrelevant in this case, and as usual, in the case of games like BF3, it's physical media that gets blamed, not the game or the developers.

Physical media doesn't suck because online-only games aren't playable through it. It's online-only games that suck. For all other non-online only games, physical media is completely viable.

If you had a car, but you didn't have any driveable roads to use it on, would you blame your car for it, or would you blame your city's representatives? So why do people blame physical media when it's the game's fault, and not physical media's?