I still don't understand why someone would prefer physical media over DRM-free digital.

Is it the smell of a freshly baked CD-ROM, or what? The taste?!?

Soon someone will mention how Ultima II came with a real cloth map made out of real baby seal skin or how Leather Goddesses of Phobos came with scratch & sniff cards (I am pretty sure the smell is all gone by now), but those days are long gone. Since early 2000s, a physical game meant a DVD-box with an optical disc and a small leaflet ("manual") in it.

After all, it is the game that matters, not that plastic skull that came with the physical legendary edition costing $399. I have 2577 games on GOG; I wonder how much room they would take as physical copies? Now they fit into one USB hard drive.

Does everything have to be entirely rational? Can't we just like something? Can't I just find small, inexplicable pleasure in taking a box of a shelf and popping a disk into the drive?

For me...

... I enjoy box art, game guides, rule books, etc... for the same reason I have both a Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen poster and an LA Noire poster hanging in my office. And, I like seeing game CD "spines" on a bookshelf alongside other adventures. To me, this makes the entire experience feel more real than just some 1's and 0's residing on a hard drive; I find games that I only own digitally "cold" and easily lost (and sometimes forgotten) amid pages of entries.

But that's just me

Thousands of games (eg, The Neverhood, Dune, Prey (2006), Lemmings, Discworld, Elite Plus, NOLF 1-2, etc) simply aren't available to buy "digitally", so "digital" never replaced them in the first place. Other originals have been "bait & switched" out for DRM'd remasters, eg, Age of Empires you have a choice of DRM-Free = Classic DVD-ROM OR 'Definitive' Remaster = Digital + DRM (inc Arxan - Microsoft's equivalent of Denuvo). Diablo 2 you have a choice of DRM-Free = Classic CD-ROM OR Resurrected Remaster = "Requires Battle.net DRM and monthly online verification even when playing offline characters." There simply is no "digital" DRM-Free version of many remasters (and none of these games are on GOG). And movies & TV series are even worse with <15-20% of the total available DVD catalogue being available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, etc, combined.

Another reason is price. Whilst some hard to get disc games are expensive / scalped, there are many others whose Ebay price is even cheaper than the 'sale' prices of many digital games. I picked up a ton of games in the 2000's for barely £1-3 each. Sometimes people having a clear out will even sell 20-odd games at once in a bundle. I got virtually the whole Sierra & LucasArts collection for next to nothing years ago. Many digital games on the other hand have actually gone up in price either because sale discounts have been noticeably reduced (eg, DOS games here with barely 30% discounts) or because access to the originals has been "gated" behind a 4-8x more expensive Remaster after the original was removed from sale as a purchasable game in its own right.

Many games whose "manual was just a leaflet" were typically budget-label re-releases (eg, SoldOut!) but that doesn't mean all of them were. Plenty of disc games had extras well into the mid 2000's, eg, Oblivion (2006) had a large fold-out map as did Morrowind (2002). The foldout Age of Empires / Age of Mythology unit / civilisation guides were also superb when you were just starting out learning the game. Frontier: Elite 2's huge A2+ sized foldout Galaxy map was exceptionally helpful when navigating around and certainly more useful than squinting at a JPG of the same on a 6" phone screen. Other games regularly came with free soundtrack DLC's (still got my 'In The Lounge' NOLF CD) whilst many "Red-Book Audio" games could often be ripped as a music CD. Today, free soundtracks on "digital" games have been increasingly replaced with paid DLC (often over-compressed MP3's at that...)

About a quarter century ago I lost an optical drive because I had chosen the minimal install for Fallout and the constant spin ups and downs while playing the game simply broke the drive within weeks, so ever since that incident, only DOS games that could not be easily dumped to disk and any games with CDA-tracks were exempt of my "No buy before a NoCD fix gets released" rule.

So the last time I had any need for an optical drive on my then current primary gaming system was almost two decades ago, as by then I had already started to install my games to older computers in order to make sure that I would turn them portable before starting to play them, and once I no longer had any ISA slots in my later computers, there really was no reason to boot to DOS with them anymore.

I wouldn't go as far as calling liking discs and boxes etc as irrational ... more illogical in the face of all factors, perhaps.

I have many boxed games with discs (CD or DVD). I don't use them, but I do like looking at them, even though most have been replaced by GOG purchases (free or paid). Mostly for me it's nostalgia, but there is something more real about physical media, though in reality a HDD is just as physical and real as a disc.

And to be honest, as nerdy and gadget loving as I am, we live in a scary age of data loss, that can all too easily happen and has done so for many folk. So there is a sense, at least for me, that a bought pre-recorded disc is kind of safer. I don't feel that way about burnt discs, because I have known too many to fail ... and they may have failed, just because the disc burning drive wasn't tracking quite true when it burnt the disc, which tended to happen as the drives got older or had lots of use. So I am a bit anal these days and store my data as 4 copies, one each on 4 independent physical drives.

As for having an optical drive, which my latest Win 11 PC doesn't have, I just use either my portable DVD or Blu-ray USB drives. Though not for game discs, just usually ripping music CDs and perhaps the occasional DVD or Blu-ray movie disc.

There is no denying though, that digital downloads and storage are way more convenient these days. Also easier to find things if your library is large and stored in different locations especially.

I will likely never sell my boxed games though, except when downsizing due to my age etc ... unless my kids want them.

P.S. I certainly gave up playing games via a disc many years ago, long before I started using GOG. I would rip the discs to virtual discs and use No CD patches, rather than wear my drives out and listen to all that whirring ... not to mention risk scratches etc.

I had the opportunity to play on PS4 with discs needed. It's a nightmare to listen to. Wheeeeew! WheeeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeWWwwww! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!

Say NO to annoying decibels.

For PC? GOG, definitely. For console, I prefer physical media. It's well and good to have downloadable content that's available anywhere and is just a few short clicks away --

but then again, sometimes companies want to modify or change the content I purchased without asking what I want. Remember DOOM3? The entire game was built around the incredible lighting technology they built in that engine. The gaming public didn't react well to it, and so for over a decade the only version available online was the DOOM3 BFG Edition. The BFG Edition is still good, but they yanked out things I would have preferred to have the option to keep. Like having to choose between weapons and flashlight. This is a core concept of the game they just yanked without giving anybody the option to keep it.

Fortunately, there were still physical copies around, and now we have vanilla DOOM3 on GOG! The physical copy cannot be revoked from my library. Cannot have the music yanked out due to rights issues (looking at you, Quake!). It's something that I own, run, and I don't need Microsoft's permission. I worry about how much of what we take for granted is dissolving in front of us and by and large the public seems to take no notice.

I can back up my games from GOG. GOG doesn't keep count of how many times I've installed the game and limits me to five installs (CAPCOM!!!). GOG doesn't make me call home to make sure I have a signed permission slip to play my games. We were losing that at the tail end of physical media, too. Microsoft tried to make us pay a fee to play used games on the XBox One and the gamer community slapped that right back down.

We are entering an age where we are going to lose a significant chunk of the corpus of interactive storytelling. Movie studios used to dissolve the negatives of their oldest, most historic movies for the silver in the film. So much of the formative history of cinema, when movie makers were making up the rules, is just gone. How much was there to learn? We will never know.

Pre-recorded (i.e. stamped) CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays have lifespans in the range 25-500 years (PDF Source) while for recordable media it is 5-100 years - hard drives are unlikely to have a similar lifetime, though a conscientious backup routine can correct for that.

CD/DVDs cannot be changed - this immutability can be both good and bad. You will probably need to apply patches (and mods) which themselves need to be stored, but you also have a guaranteed starting point allowing you to avoid forced updates.

Physical extras can certainly be significant (maps, tech charts, "feelies").

GOG versions tend to come with the latest patches and sometimes third party mods. However GOG have sometimes added "extras" which can negatively affect the playing experience (e.g. GOG Galaxy).

GOG have also included "compatibility fixes" that break games for older OSes.

So which is best (GOG-physical) really has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

You had me after the third paragraph - I feel just the same way. Your vintage CD ROM games are a totally tangible pleasure in a world of digital ether

My main gaming pc is XP and I have all the gaming & simming I could ever want on disc. I love my media!

Whatever PC games still bother with physical releases, will supply a Steam key, making it completely worthless.

I agree, Steam keys are completely worthless.

It's nice to see a game on a shelf, but nowadays many CD/DVDs are just a decoration, due to lack of copy protection support in Win10 and Win11... so I prefer GOG.

The main issue with physical media is that many of the games I play require between 5 and 50 updates. So physical media in a store would be something like a beta version.

If you want something physical you should download the updated game and then write it to your own physical media of choice.