Apart from multimedia enthusiasts, nobody really notices or cares much, I reckon. And streaming these days has gotten to the point where it can deliver fairly good looking 4K content, so...

If people don't notice a difference or do not care, that's up to them. I have a small OLED TV with no sound setup, and I can tell the difference. And there are people out there with much larger TV's/projector screens PLUS sound setups. If you can't tell the difference, that's up to you. But if I have a nice display and/or a great sound system, I want to take advantage of it


Bottom line is, you never own anything that you stream. That's a fact.

The correct answer is "both". :-) Digital has its space conveniences. On the other hand, no physical = no classics like Age of Empires 1-2, Age of Mythology, Diablo 2, Dune, No One Lives Forever 1-2, etc, a sizeable number of which sit in my top 100 games of all time just as much as "digital" games do. Besides which it's not like GOG games can't be burned to DVD-R / BD-R (hence the cover art thread), nor is it impossible to rip disc games to ISO / create your own installers from the game folders, and there's your "digital" copy of them.

Fair enough. But I was under the impression we were discussing general preferences and trends of the times, not your own, which seem to be a bit more conservative :P.

Agreed, I was never contesting that. I'd still like to have the option to buy multimedia content (digital or physical) for the stuff I am really passionate about... but let's be serious - nobody wants to own *everything* they watch over stream. Streaming is the tape rental service of the 80s.

Wow, I feel like I was teleported back to 2006 or so, when physical games were still a thing... Starforce this, SecuROM that, Sony rootkit too...

Ok ok, I guess they still are somewhat on consoles (at least the Nintendo Switch version of Minecraft I bought was "physical"), but for all intents and purposes, PC gaming has been 100% digital for the last decade or so. Or at least 97% digital.

I see absolutely no benefits for physical games (compared to digital DRM-free installers), so that is my answer, from here to eternity. Unless the 2242 GOG game installers on my hard drives are considered "physical games".

Q: "Do you prefer buying games on GOG or on physical media?"

A: The question "would you rather buy GOG or physical" never really posed itself (for me), since the games GOG had on offer, most of us already owned in their physical form anyway (well, at least I did/do).

And at the time GOG came around, more and more games only saw physical releases attached to a Steam key, so the actual question was: "would you rather DRM-ed or DRM-free?"

And honestly? The last game that I ever bought on a physical media, was a game for the PS4 - and that purchase took place two or three years ago.

And PC games? Why should I purchase a game for PC in form of a physical medium, if all I get for my money is a sticker with a Steam-/Uplay-/Origin-/whatever-key and an otherwise empty DVD-/BluRay-case?

Agreed, but there is one difference. Getting a physical from retail nets you a pressed disc. The burnt ones, which you can make at home are much worse when it comes to longevity.

As you said, you can make an ISO out of any disc (unless DRMd), but you can't make a pressed disc at home.

That more comes down to ECC that's burned into the system than anything else. Doing research on Reed Solomon codes showed they could cut the power output needed by nearly half by including a few ECC bits, the ECC allowing it to fix the stream of data (within a number of errors). As such a hole or scratch won't prevent a disc from being read as it corrects the data on the fly; Though i really wish the hardware would send a warning based on the number of errors for you to make a new copy of said disc to preserve it vs just dying outright later (at least for anything you CAN make a copy of)

Though eventually data fades from thumb drives and discs break down. Though floppy disks in the past died much faster than our media does today...

For the sake of historical clarity: the data on them got corrupted quite easily, but they rarely died. Usually a full format (or a repeated full format) got a corrupted disk back to a usable state, with full capacity and no bad sectors. Using floppies for long term storage was a mad man's game though.

It's true writable disks have a limited shelf life, as the organic layer responsible for preserving the "burned" data degrades over time. But it had gotten to a point where 50 years were a given with adequate storage conditions... and if memory serves stuff like "Azo Blue" was said to last over 100 years (lifetime guarantee™ and all that).

I still remember caring and worrying about these things back in the day, but I've grown wiser since then... any type of storage media will usually die out due to technical obsolescence long before it degrades itself into oblivion.

Ten years ago I would have said physical media for sure. For me physical media has three benefits: Cool packaging/extras, permanence, and a fixed version (initial release).

Packaging is less important to me now although I miss the extras like maps. The fixed version is still a thing with online game stores removing access to old versions when games are patched or "feature-enhanced".

Permanence is also a big plus but I have games that are coming up to 30 years old on CD-ROM and although they are long-lived they don't last forever. Given also that nearly everyone has a mixture of physical and digital games in their libraries and it's more important for me to have a good backup and maintenance system so that the digital installers (and physical CD-rips) don't get corrupted or lost over time.

So yeah now I don't care, I just want a downloadable installer without DRM which I can download, backup and keep for however long I want to.

Yes and no. They started implementing DRM and making copying disks VERY difficult. Some of it was hardware tricks, some sector count working, etc. So back then once you had errors on the program/game you paid for, you're SOL and you have to buy another one.

LGR covers this along with other DRM methods.

Good point, a lot of physical media is more difficult to copy (either inherently due to the format with books, or artificially with game disks where they put copy inhering mechanisms on the disks) which limits the lifespan of your purchase to the lifespan of your medium.

I do think about that somethings for my past movie purchases (less so for my physical books as they tend to be very long lived, though I do miss the convenience of being able to cram a whole bunch of them on my tablet).

MetalJesus sucks. i dun wanna pay overhyped "collector" prices for retro games. get the fug out!

as much as i like physical IRL media, i started hating them when they started using malware encryption that was 1000X worse than just "CD-Key" kinda stuff, or old skool "type this from the manual to continue playing".

Duplicate thread: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/why_did_you_even_switch_to_digital_purchases_from_physical_media

i would prefer buying physical drm free games but they don't exist anymore.