this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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Maybe the reason physical seems to outlast digital is because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are the companies most known for switching from physical to digital. These companies are greedy and anti-consumer and they seemed to have made the switch in order to push more anti-consumer practices.
There's no natural reason a physical game should outlast a digital one. The reason they do entirely comes from corporate greed. My steam library contains a copy of Gazillionare, a game released in 1994. A game still available for sale on Steam and that runs on my Linux box today. Games sold as digital downloads aren't inherently bad. The underlying issue is corporate greed.
Sure. I wouldn't be working as part of the Retro eXo team if it wasn't possible to preserve games digitally. But physical discs do something beyond not being possible to delist - they provide a snapshot of what the game was when it was pressed, which cannot be altered. Say a company is licensed to include music in a game for x number of years. After that time runs out, they may strip the content from the game. Another example is how companies like GOG strip out drivers and setup files from the retro games they put online. They rip content out of games as bad as dialup era websites like Home of the Underdogs did. A game might only be left with a single EGA video mode and Sound Blaster audio. Forget stuff like MT-32 - GOG always removes the files necessary for it to work. In the end, we can't really trust the companies to keep anything online.