If they are DRM free so they could be resold or shared/traded then I'm on board. The only two problems I have with digital shit is you cannot share/lend/resell it and, if you're not in control of storing it, there's no guarantee it will always be available after purchase.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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similarly to vinyls for music.
This one sucks so much. Vinyl coming back is awful.
- It is heavy, it costs a lot and takes a lot of energy to transport
- it is made of plasticizers, usually phthalates with lead as a stabilizer
- it degrades from every use
- the waste chemicals are often dumped into rivers and streams in poor populations
- a lot of energy is used in the steaming and pressing
- the sound quality is not as good as people think it is (inner distortion anyone?) and the "warm" and "feel good" sound are easily replicated in other ways. I don't want to dwell on this one. Lets just say mastering and your equipment have a lot to do with this.
The whole point of PC is digital data though.
The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.
CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.
I know people complain about Steam all the time with "you don't actually own your games" but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.
Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that's lock in, but that's where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.
It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don't let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It's a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.
Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.
Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it's probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that's a concern.
What I'd like to see is good selling indie games doing a "limited edition" or "supporter edition" 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.
Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.
I'd definitely buy copies if games like "Sea of Stars" or "Ori and the Blind Forest" did this
As much as I prefer physical release. Optical media is dogshit overall. it's restrictive on size, subject to bit rot, and prone to being damaged if not kept properly.
I would much prefer the ability to have it software/digital side, but have actual ownership of it.
Hell it could even still have DRM as long as I had the authority to sell it or trade it again when I was done and didn't involve crashing my performance like denuvo does.
Digital media could 1000% work well its just companies don't want it to work well, as a digital release with the benefits of physical media actively means less sales for them.
we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in
physical versions could be offered for those, i think it would be cool! but it’s not necessary imo. as long as it’s preservable and transferable, it’s good.
You just described GoG which I don't even want to recommend after they sent a bunch of Nazi emails and then went "Oopsie doopsie poopsie sowwie".
yea gog can fuck off but the way they do games distribution is how it should be for everyone imo
It's not the disc itself that people care about, it's having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.
Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren't synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can't share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you're SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.
People don't hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.
That's one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property. Sadly, they got ruined by the ape jpeg grifters who didn't even bother to upload the actual image to the blockchain. The entirety of Steam, Spotify, and Netflix could fit on a specialized blockchain like Arweave, but none of the publishers or big media corporations have any interest in doing that when they can "sell" them to you every 5 years or, better yet, let you rent them one month at a time. Maybe if one day people stop "buying" them, they'll be forced to do that, but I won't hold my breath.
That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property.
How would you: make the key transferable and secret, while still notifying the original vender it happened, and collect payment, and keep me from selling and turning off the key?
And once the vendor went away, no new keys would be issued. So why make a public crypto ledger, when their ledger suffices?
Just like an NFT. Useless in this case too.
Imo they weren't ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren't running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It's just an unregulated stock.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don't need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game's license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn't give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.
Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else
But this would not be interoperable with other services, and to make it interoperable would require mutual trust and coordination between them that does not exist. Not to say that NFTs specifically are a solution here (video games are fungible after all, and porting physical ownership properties to digital goods is a problem these companies don't want to solve to begin with), but there are actual reasons to use credibly neutral infrastructure and standards.
NFTs are built on a flawed system
What do you mean by that? What is the flaw of the system?
everything built on top of [crypto] is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency
What do you mean by "legitimate currency"? If I can buy and sell things for it, how is it illegitimate? There are plenty of non-strictly monetary blockchain and crypto applications, like arweave, for example, which is a decentralized, permissionless blockchain based data storage protocol where you can store and share encrypted private data like on google drive or publicly host files and static websites, or DAOs, which enable decentralized control and decision making through provably fair voting. Financial applications of crypto are also great. You can buy and sell things privately over the internet without a need for a middleman who will take a cut and can cut you off if the government makes them or they don't like what you're selling, like what happened with wikileaks, pornhub or more recently with steam. Platforms like hyperliquid and tokenized real world assets give people across the world, also from sanctioned and disenfranchised regions, access to global financial markets where they can privately and permissionlessly trade stocks, commodities, etc. without the need for a broker who can block buying and selling, like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, front run them, and take a cut of their trades. People from countries with high inflation like Venezuela or Turkiye can use crypto to easily and safely store their wealth in a less inflationary asset like ₿, $ with stablecoins, or tokenized gold.
or laundering ill gotten gains.
How do you launder money with crypto? I thought that starting a fake business in the service sector like a beauty parlor or a restaurant was the gold standard for money laundering, tax man don't care as long as he gets his cut.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so.
True, but that's still dependent on the marketplace continuing to exist, if it ever disappears, so does your media. I suppose that's also true for a blockchain, but it would be a lot less likely for the digital media blockchain to go down than some marketplace, and since it's decentralized, the community would have a vested interest in running nodes to help keep it alive.
They don't need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game's license.
What complex set of requirements do NFTs have? You can deploy them pretty easily these days. You can send them automatically upon payment, and you wouldn't even need a server for that or validation of licenses, as it could all be done in the EVM with a smart contract.
Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else
This doesn't address the accessibility issue. If the service goes down, you lose the media you "bought", and doesn't work for services without DRM.
The first question is kinda encompassed by the rest of the structure, so I'll work through the others and come back to it.
Legitimate currency, is admittedly a nebulous term, so I'll revise this to match something closer to what I meant: minted, regulated currency held to an economic demand. I believe there's merit to this system, though its benefits have been substantially eroded by modern aristocrats.
By my statement, I meant to say that the most popular use-cases are frequently that of investment, rather than good-faith application of cryptocurrency as currency. I recognize this isn't true of all currencies, but as long as it remains the case, crypto will continue to be utilized as an investment vehicle for national currencies rather than as something I could go buy my groceries or pay my bills with. One of the biggest fundamental problems that have been a challenge to solve for cryptocurrencies is the overall stability of its value. For some currencies, the idea was that a limited supply would lead to a fixed value, or that proof of work systems would mitigate speculation. This hasn't proven true. It cannot be tied to someone's needs, and instead floats based on wants or hype. This is remedied by stable-coins, but at this point you've only recreated a national currency with extra hoops to jump through to use it. That said, I do recognize its value as a means to ensure some personal liquidity in nations where the currency at home is more volatile than not, but I think the flaw in this is that no matter what you end up pinning your personal wealth to someone else's economy.
And believe me, I agree people should be able to spend their money how they please. No few should have complete power of the many, especially not in how the many may accumulate or redistribute their wealth. Robinhood, stock exchanges and their third party brokers should not have power to affect this. In a well-regulated context, they would not.
Now let's talk about money laundering and fraud. I wasn't referring to an old mafia outfit. Organized crime has evolved well past that, though I'm sure a shell company with some shady accou ti g is part of the process. Cryptocurrencies are weak for the same reason they are strong. Wallet addresses are at worst, pseudnonymous. It is possible to track them through transactions to exchanges or services with KYC requirements, but not all blockchain services expose transactions transparently. This makes currencies like Monero a popular option for anyone looking to hide the sources and destinations of their payments without needing to worry about how to balance their books for a nail salon. Add in tumbling services for popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins and now you've got yourself a very convenient pipeline for shady dealings.
As a privacy advocate, I believe in the ability to make a cash deal with someone without the scrutiny of the bank, payment processor or other entities, but many of those guiding principles have led to the design of systems that directly facilitate scams, fraud, human trafficking and espionage. The fact that there is no oversight means there are no repercussions until that money re-enters a national currency. It's an immensely popular way to hide wealth for those who are already rich beyond their means as well. Everything about it requires trusting the individual, and that's rarely the correct choice.
As for decentralization. I agree here, that's a better approach. The web should be a collection of nodes, with each reaching to the other to properly describe its namesake. Instead, we have the problem of consolidation among services, where large entities with the means to do so have become immovable conglomerates of critical infrastructure, developing a hub and spoke design instead of the web it was first called. However, blockchains by nature risk the same eventuality. A blockchain relies on redundancy. It needs to be able to point to its own history, and then it needs to have copies of that history redistributed among the entire network of users. The problem is that this requirement becomes exponentially more difficult to fulfill as its use and history extends further. Mining needs to be performed to validate transactions, but mining becomes more time consuming the longer the chain. As a result, the ability to perform these tasks is directly tied to the person able to afford the hardware required. There's an initial or ongoing investment required no matter what. Not to mention that the validation of these transaction requires energy. It needs to be done computationally, and the cost of that computation also increases as the chain does. The environmental impact may be overshadowed by present AI training datacenters, but it's still a present and largely unsolved issue.
I hadn't heard of arweave mind you, but nothing in their documentation about hosting a node or being part of the chain itself leads me to believe they have found a solution to this, which is a must, if you are to rely on it as a stable, distributed storage medium. That said, its permanent storage design is intriguing, since it has the potential to address common problems with the bittorrent protocol.
As for complexity, it's as described above. The infrastructure is the complexity. You're right, it's easy to deploy an NFT, but there is no move to standardize on a platform for them. No self-serving enterprise is going to set themselves up on a chain of custody they do not have control over. I admit this is a political complexity, not a technical one, but I think it's a truth to contend with for the same reason centralized services exist to begin with.
As for your last point: I don't believe in NFTs because I fundamentally do not believe in DRM. Smart contracts, NFTs and blockchains on the whole are designed to track, verify, and validate the transfer of ownership in a way that describes and acts as an extension of existing DRM schemes. It goes beyond a certificate of trust, and introduces the limitations of physical property into a digital space. In fact, it doesn't even solve the resale problem because there would be nothing to prevent a vendor from reintroducing some kind of SecuROM nightmare via a Smart Contract.
I think the base technology is important. At the end of the day blockchains are actually a useful technology, with wide application. But the need to have visibility of the whole transaction is the flaw. You can mitigate it somewhat by chunking the chain and holding data in different places, but the data must remain intact.
You can't reason with someone who is already biased to one position. They'll never try to see the benefits.
But yeah we can have visa and mastercard approve all of our purchases too
I am biased, I admit, but that stems from lived experience. I was, for a time, pretty invested in the concept of cryptocurrencies, blockchain cryptography and NFTs. I don't like traditional payment processors or banks, but I don't think NFTs themselves are the solution. In general, I think applying physical restrictions to digital content is a bad idea, and ultimately that's what NFTs and smart contracts aim to do. It sounds nice to be able to validate ownership, but all it does is prop up existing licensing schemes by building a framework to enforce them.
And if you don't see a problem with that, then we've got different perspectives on the world and that's fine, but don't assume I'm not willing to listen.
I mean, there’s no reason NFTs are needed for that, a normal database would also work.
Sure but when a company shuts down or decides to shut down the database all the media goes with it. That's what sony just did, all the stuff you "bought" went poof. Not having the ability to transfer the license is only half of the issue.
No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).
This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).
I think drm-free indie oriented publishers like Annapurna could make a lot of money with physical copies.
I doubt it. At least for all but the most viral of indie games. Manufacturing physical copies is expensive and would involve minimum order quantity from suppliers.
Tbh, popular indie games could probably use crowdfunding platforms post launch to do it
As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I'm not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
I could see physical releases, at least as special editions, being a thing people would like. Though I think today SD cards would make more sense, at least if flash memory prices ever come back down.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
Essentially Switch cartridges, but PC
Exactly
That may be true, I just don't see the point of storing the DRM free installerі on an optical disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
Most computers don't have optical disc drives (I do have one, but I am exception and I don't use it for data).
I combine the two.
Burn offline drm free installers onto blank cds.
Well... Dvds, I can fit some older games into cds but they don't have the same capacity.
Optical media really isn't your friend. I love it, I have loads of old games on optical discs and I bought a PS5 with its disc drive specifically because that's how I wanted to buy the media. But I also back up what I can to spinning rust or solid state drives that can sit cold stored until I want them. Optical media will degrade. There are exceptions, like M-Disc, but the medium is slow and space consuming.
If the files are DRM-free as they said, then there's nothing stopping backups. I don't get why you're trying to paint it as an either/or thing
I'm not sure I understand. Whether it's DRM free or not has no bearing on the reliability of optical media as a backup format. Discs you write to are not generally as reliable as factory pressings, with some archival exceptions, so it's not the ideal choice. I wasn't making any argument about whether it works or not.
I mean, I have an external hdd I keep a backup of important files on, and an ssd I use to transfer things onto a second computer, and it's just a full backup of my primary pc.
Fair enough. I didn't assume you were doing that for data generally. My original comment was unnecessarily condescending in tone, sorry about that.
Physical media has long sailed but not drm free software.
(I'm not sure which of those you're referring to, just clearly stating)
I was talking about data storage on optical discs, not DRM free installers. :)
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I've been burning cds with my offline installers on every game I can. Finding blank cds in physical stores is hard, I lucked out finding this stack brand new at a thrift store.
I would very much like to have a desktop with cd racks filling the frame around it again.
I'm like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive
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Personally, so long as it's DRM-free, physical, installers or zipped files sound like a good idea.
And like with vinyl, if it comes back, it's to be expected that it isn't as big as it once was. But being there, it's another option for the preservation and ownership folks.
No, it's not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.
For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn't release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.
There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they're the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that's it.
if a popular console platform became a 'free for all', i don't think its 'protections' would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
I like this, sure
Maybe something like CD/DVDs that Verbatim has, the ones made our of stone so they can last +100 years and are I think 50GB in space?
I miss being able to easily share fully functioning games...
Its easy to pirate and even legal in some places...
But I might buy physical discs with games if they are featured in some physical store!
Again as someone said I dont know about how DRM works on discs but we cant have that
A perfect standard has to be developed first. Go.
Most laptops don't have an optical drive any more. I haven't looked at desktops.
You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but...
Audio optical media sales peaked a long time back and have massively declined since then.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
Quarter-century back that they peaked.
Successor physical audio formats haven't caught on.
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Physical releases cost a fair bit to make, from just printing the media and designing the package and so on. And then there's storing and shipping the game around the world so people could actually buy it.
Shipping could be out sourced to the customer easily enough (some kind of direct to customer sales model), but the rest is still a good chunk of extra cost for the publisher. Manufacturing like this also typically has to be paid in advance, so harder for smaller publishers and Indies to get it done in the first place.
I don't think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items, it just doesn't make sense for normal releases at this point.
I don't think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items,
Sure, but you say that like it's a bad thing
While this would be great, we'd have to stockpile on said media which is less convenient. Discs were great but they'd always get lost somewhere and/or used a lot of space when stacked.
I'd personally prefer to download the files on a hard drive which could hold thousands of games while saving space. Only problem being that these games would need to be transferred to an SSD for better read/writing speeds. On the other hand discs would only need to be plugged into a disc slot which may or may not seem very convenient considering how most laptops/PCs don't have those, meaning we'd need to buy these extra.
Either way having pretty discs with collectibles like in the good old days seems like a good idea if you're into that sort of things.
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