It is making somewhat of a comeback, although don't think that's the correct word.

I was watching a YouTube video of someone who ran a music store explaining CD's are becoming popular again as remasters and whats on streaming services being altered with autotune, etc to remove the imperfections which some find are the sole of the music.

Same by movie buff's and films been modified, Original StarWars films been the most famous examples.

In our hobby we have games like GTA and Warcraft 3 remasters which many people didn't like.

I know this isn't what you were talking about, but it is a justification to still have physical media. Plenty of people also miss going into stores and picking up physical boxes, CD art and whatever else, but have to admit those days have gone

chinny22 wrote on 2025-04-10, 05:46:

It is making somewhat of a comeback, although don't think that's the correct word. […]
Show full quote

It is making somewhat of a comeback, although don't think that's the correct word.

I was watching a YouTube video of someone who ran a music store explaining CD's are becoming popular again as remasters and whats on streaming services being altered with autotune, etc to remove the imperfections which some find are the sole of the music.

Same by movie buff's and films been modified, Original StarWars films been the most famous examples.

In our hobby we have games like GTA and Warcraft 3 remasters which many people didn't like.

I know this isn't what you were talking about, but it is a justification to still have physical media. Plenty of people also miss going into stores and picking up physical boxes, CD art and whatever else, but have to admit those days have gone

Itll come back just not as it was .. the new tech I'm hearing about for recording to optical media increases its storage to two hundred terabytes for standard single layer DvD sized discs...imagine discs with dual or triple layers with 600 terabytes of storage.

So yes we will see it again and Im all for it, Optical media always had the advantage of being far more capable at storing data than spinning rust we just never had the laser tech to take advantage of it till the last year or two.

There's a reason why I've pivoted away from "modern gaming" and almost entirely gone retro, on the PC in the last year!

Worst part is retroactive content changes and in worst case, censorship. Which the consumer is generally powerless to fight back against, with digital-only titles. I'm just glad I have my physical Warcraft III and Frozen Throne discs, after the monumental Reforged cock-up. Not to mention the issue of forced patching and originally made-for-XP games that can't even be played on WIndows XP anymore, as a result.

I am quite happy however, having managed to score a large number of old game that are till factory sealed. And the amazing part is that some of them even still had that factory fresh smell inside, after 20 years!!! 🤤

Man, look back to how most pre-CD era games came.. Boxes had some really nice goodies in addition to the game's media. Many times containing physical cloth maps, trinkets, and similar cool stuff. Nowadays, the only thing that resembles that is the collector's edition.. and you pay 250$ and more to be able to get one if you're lucky and fast enough.

As CDs became dominant game media, companies started to cheap out and put manuals as digital documents on the CD.. bleh! The box then ended up containing just a CD and maybe a registration card. Then came the DVD cases, which are doubly-boring. I don't like to collect those.

From the software standpoint.. absolutely. I'd take physical media any time over digital. I don't care about updates. When I find a 30min time slot in my day, I like to pop in the cart or disk or CD and just play.. not serve a stupid machine or software to ensure it's up to date on crap I never care about.

The little trinkets were fun, the maps were useable to get around, but the manuals and stories were very cool. Of course, you also had code wheels (using ink that was hard to copy) that were a pain if you lost them. The key differences between the old pre internet games and the last of the boxed ones that included more than just a disk to install steam and a code for the game was that old games were supposed to work out of the box with no patches. These days new games are mostly unplayable until a bunch of updates are made for bug fixes.

I also miss the old application boxes with manuals that described everything in decent English.

Alexraptor wrote on 2025-04-10, 07:11:

Worst part is retroactive content changes and in worst case, censorship. Which the consumer is generally powerless to fight back against, with digital-only titles. I'm just glad I have my physical Warcraft III and Frozen Throne discs, after the monumental Reforged cock-up. Not to mention the issue of forced patching and originally made-for-XP games that can't even be played on WIndows XP anymore, as a result.

for me this is the main reason to have physical media. There is no real limit to the use of AI and other techniques to mask, alter or replace things for "modern audiences" (i.e. for the distributor's perception of risk/benefit)

This already happened in movies and songs, dubbing and editing certain film scenes and same with songs when broadcast

It can happen carelessly at scale now, ask an 'ai' editor to search and replace all instances with a voice matched softer word, or change scenes to alter certain expressions, events and so forth over 1000's of films and songs

Indeed, eventually just stream partly or wholly generated stuff at individuals according to a mix of their history, analysed probably preferences and corporately managed / interpreted 'social credit'. They will see only what has been curated for them and they alone see it, no shared culture. None this stuff seems as far fetched these days as it might have a mere 5 years ago.

Even without all that - note the way streaming services regularly add and remove things to their library, well if you have something physical and a means to play it you're safe from that and you only pay once. I guess that works for digital storage too, if you are doing the storing

Alexraptor wrote on 2025-04-10, 07:11:

I am quite happy however, having managed to score a large number of old game that are till factory sealed.

I'm in the same boat, though I buy a lot of second hand boxes too. However, for PC games, collecting physical copies only works up to 2007 or so. Around that time (give or take a few years), certain games started including online DRM, so having the physical disc is no longer enough. Ubisoft and EA were the worst in that regard. See this video by Tech Tangents for more details.

Thankfully, it's possible to buy some of those games DRM-free from GOG. For others, I like to get the Xbox 360 version, since that works fine without an internet connection. Splinter Cell Conviction, Assassin's Creed 2 and Diablo 3 are examples where it's just simpler to use the console versions if you want to play offline.

Bring Back That Floppy.

I was mostly talking about burned CD and DVD
However (big surprise) I have a pretty large collection of movies and TV on DVD
I have read quite a few discussions forums about people unhappy with streaming services

wbahnassi wrote on 2025-04-10, 07:32:

Man, look back to how most pre-CD era games came.. Boxes had some really nice goodies in addition to the game's media. Many times containing physical cloth maps, trinkets, and similar cool stuff. Nowadays, the only thing that resembles that is the collector's edition.. and you pay 250$ and more to be able to get one if you're lucky and fast enough.

As CDs became dominant game media, companies started to cheap out and put manuals as digital documents on the CD.. bleh! The box then ended up containing just a CD and maybe a registration card. Then came the DVD cases, which are doubly-boring. I don't like to collect those.

From the software standpoint.. absolutely. I'd take physical media any time over digital. I don't care about updates. When I find a 30min time slot in my day, I like to pop in the cart or disk or CD and just play.. not serve a stupid machine or software to ensure it's up to date on crap I never care about.

I remember reading the stories that went with the games. Mechwarrior 2 and dark reign had an admittedly thin, but still decent booklet with various lore, detailed model drawings and unit specs.
I guess when graphics were hard to do the vision justice you had to improve the immersion with background story.

This was the case with the atari 2600's Yar's Revenge.

It had a full on mini comic book inside the box to explain the story.

https://www.atarimania.com/documents/atari_co … ars_revenge.pdf

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-04-10, 08:07:

Alexraptor wrote on 2025-04-10, 07:11:

I am quite happy however, having managed to score a large number of old game that are till factory sealed.

I'm in the same boat, though I buy a lot of second hand boxes too. However, for PC games, collecting physical copies only works up to 2007 or so. Around that time (give or take a few years), certain games started including online DRM, so having the physical disc is no longer enough. Ubisoft and EA were the worst in that regard. See this video by Tech Tangents for more details.

Thankfully, it's possible to buy some of those games DRM-free from GOG. For others, I like to get the Xbox 360 version, since that works fine without an internet connection. Splinter Cell Conviction, Assassin's Creed 2 and Diablo 3 are examples where it's just simpler to use the console versions if you want to play offline.

Yeah, I've encountered the same problem.

I usually end up doing meticulous research when planning my purchases. In some cases there are "workarounds", but i tend to entirely skip buying games that are integrated/reliant on Steam/Epic/EA/Ubisoft/Battle.net etc. Mainly due to the lack of standalone patches.

GOG is pretty much the only way I buy digital games anymore. But i kinda prefer the cozy little ritual of placing a physical disc in the drive. 😀

I'm not surprised that physical media is no longer used, given that few gamers have the patience to read physical book(lets) or look at physical maps, if we're talking about gaming.

And to some extent I understand that since I too prefer to simply play a game and discover its secrets that way.

This does not mean that I have something against physical media. Indeed, it has some advantages that I like, especially regarding preservation. In fact, I've saved a few software titles and files on DVDs, to ensure that I don't lose them. In my opinion, this is the main advantage of physical media.

But physical media does have some disadvantages, too. Being physical, it means it's a fixed structure that has to be read by some physical mechanisms in order to retrieve information. What if those mechanisms are no longer produced and their technology is lost? Then you have media that can no longer be read.
It's much easier to recreate a software "mechanism" than a physical one.

dionis32 wrote on 2025-04-10, 14:41:

But physical media does have some disadvantages, too. Being physical, it means it's a fixed structure that has to be read by some physical mechanisms in order to retrieve information. What if those mechanisms are no longer produced and their technology is lost? Then you have media that can no longer be read.
It's much easier to recreate a software "mechanism" than a physical one.

Every storage medium has this disadvantge, I think.
A "cloud" storage doesn't exist, it's just someone else's computer.
Servers can suffer from data loss, too. Not all files are being mirrored same time.

Edit: This reminds me of something of the past.
A few years ago I was browsing an obscure old website archived by Wayback Machine.
So far so good. The interesting part, however, was what happened when retrieving a very old copy from 1996.
It took unusually long. What happened?
I can only guess, but I think that the files must have been stored somewhere on a very rarely accessed server or HDD.

When you really think about it, floppy disks are the ideal medium for storing small amounts of data in a low tech way. Magnetic storage is fundamental. What do you need to read and write it? An very small electromagnet. One man could build a rudimentary floppy drive, and the disks, from scratch as an exercise. What do you need to read a CD? A laser is much more sophisticated. Not to mention DVD or BluRay. Flash memory is a different thing entirely as the sophistication lies mostly in the production of the chips, which is another thing. Layers upon layers of manufacturing process and knowledge. Sophistication beyond the understanding of any one person.

There's something to knowing that several Manhattan Projects aren't the precursors to you being able to read this data. Just a few Nazi scientists inventing magnetic tape heads so Hitler could listen to Wagner in Hi-Fi, plus the industrial capacity to produce precision machined parts that has existed since the 1800s, plus the electronics industry's ability to produce transistors and simple integrated circuits.

Of course, the transistor is the precursor to all of this, unless you wanted to build a floppy drive with vacuum tubes lol.

The typical argument for physical media (I OWN it!) I think is pretty weak. If you have downloaded the game, you own your copy of it now. It's just as easy for companies to put absurd DRM schemes on a disk, but they can't change the fact that you have that series of bytes on your hard drive and you can do what you want with it now, including cracking their licensing apparatus if you can figure out how. It's why they do those things in the first place, in a futile effort to get people to stop copying their software.

It's downstream of the fact that software is an ephemeral thing. It takes next to zero effort and zero dollars to copy it. That's always going to be the case. It's the case with any digital files. Remember the NFT craze, and the "right click save as" meme that mocked it? The meme was correct. If you put something on the internet, or even if you put it on someone's computer, you have, like it or not, effectively given up your ability to control what happens to that data, and all of your attempts to change that reality will only be circumvented, sooner or later. You can slow down the process, of course, but you only make everyone mad when you do that.

So if you're a software company selling a game, and you want to use physical media, what you're selling is the experience of having the big box. The box itself, the disks themselves, the packaging, the manual. The artwork on the box. The serial number indicating you bought in the first production run. The "chunk-chunk-chunk" as the floppy drive reads the disks and you install the game for the first time. The experience of flipping through the manual when you get stuck. And theoretically, you've made your game so good, people derive a sense of satisfaction from supporting your company by purchasing the physical embodiment of the software.

Making it simply about ownership in and of itself feels like a losing battle.

It's not even like art where you can make money as an artist by selling "originals". There's no such thing as an "original" of your software.

It could be like art wherein a classic arrangement is for an artist to be able to produce his work only because he is commissioned by a wealthy patron. That makes more sense. Then everyone gets to enjoy the artwork forever, AND the artist gets paid. That's why we have a lot of the great art we value today. The Sistine Chapel ceiling exists because Michelangelo was paid by the Pope to produce it - never mind where the Pope got that money! Do his heirs receive royalties every time someone on the internet looks at a copy of the work? Does the Vatican try to hunt you down and sue you if you post the painting on social media?

@Jo22: agree on cloud.

But I was talking more about reading the physical support. Let's say you save some files on CDs/DVDs and you store those disks in good conditions. So far, so good. But what if optical readers are no longer fabricated and cannot be recreated? Then you have perfectly good disks but you cannot use them because you don't have anything to read them with, physically speaking.

keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-04-10, 15:14:

When you really think about it, floppy disks are the ideal medium for storing small amounts of data in a low tech way. Magnetic […]
Show full quote

When you really think about it, floppy disks are the ideal medium for storing small amounts of data in a low tech way. Magnetic storage is fundamental. What do you need to read and write it? An very small electromagnet. One man could build a rudimentary floppy drive, and the disks, from scratch as an exercise. What do you need to read a CD? A laser is much more sophisticated. Not to mention DVD or BluRay. Flash memory is a different thing entirely as the sophistication lies mostly in the production of the chips, which is another thing. Layers upon layers of manufacturing process and knowledge. Sophistication beyond the understanding of any one person.

There's something to knowing that several Manhattan Projects aren't the precursors to you being able to read this data. Just a few Nazi scientists inventing magnetic tape heads so Hitler could listen to Wagner in Hi-Fi, plus the industrial capacity to produce precision machined parts that has existed since the 1800s, plus the electronics industry's ability to produce transistors and simple integrated circuits.

Of course, the transistor is the precursor to all of this, unless you wanted to build a floppy drive with vacuum tubes lol.

The typical argument for physical media (I OWN it!) I think is pretty weak. If you have downloaded the game, you own your copy of it now. It's just as easy for companies to put absurd DRM schemes on a disk, but they can't change the fact that you have that series of bytes on your hard drive and you can do what you want with it now, including cracking their licensing apparatus if you can figure out how. It's why they do those things in the first place, in a futile effort to get people to stop copying their software.

It's downstream of the fact that software is an ephemeral thing. It takes next to zero effort and zero dollars to copy it. That's always going to be the case. It's the case with any digital files. Remember the NFT craze, and the "right click save as" meme that mocked it? The meme was correct. If you put something on the internet, or even if you put it on someone's computer, you have, like it or not, effectively given up your ability to control what happens to that data, and all of your attempts to change that reality will only be circumvented, sooner or later. You can slow down the process, of course, but you only make everyone mad when you do that.

So if you're a software company selling a game, and you want to use physical media, what you're selling is the experience of having the big box. The box itself, the disks themselves, the packaging, the manual. The artwork on the box. The serial number indicating you bought in the first production run. The "chunk-chunk-chunk" as the floppy drive reads the disks and you install the game for the first time. The experience of flipping through the manual when you get stuck. And theoretically, you've made your game so good, people derive a sense of satisfaction from supporting your company by purchasing the physical embodiment of the software.

Making it simply about ownership in and of itself feels like a losing battle.

It's not even like art where you can make money as an artist by selling "originals". There's no such thing as an "original" of your software.

It could be like art wherein a classic arrangement is for an artist to be able to produce his work only because he is commissioned by a wealthy patron. That makes more sense. Then everyone gets to enjoy the artwork forever, AND the artist gets paid. That's why we have a lot of the great art we value today. The Sistine Chapel ceiling exists because Michelangelo was paid by the Pope to produce it - never mind where the Pope got that money! Do his heirs receive royalties every time someone on the internet looks at a copy of the work? Does the Vatican try to hunt you down and sue you if you post the painting on social media?

You are over simplifying Floppy disks and the drives and software required to make it happen.

They seem simple as face value but look at how long it took for them to get to a point you could actually store a usable amount of data on them with long term integrity, they dont have a long life either and what life they have is subject to storage conditions and the materials they are made from.

I would rather have a USB stick.

Which is more complex: the USB stick or the floppy drive, in terms of the entire process from mining the raw materials to getting the data in your computer's memory? Don't miss the point of what I was trying to say.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-04-10, 14:57:

I can only guess, but I think that the files must have been stored somewhere on a very rarely accessed server or HDD.

yes if you are browsing Wayback Machine and see missing images (broken links), wait a while and refresh the page, because they will sometimes appear.

They are obviously being stored in some high latency storage medium that takes time to retrieve data from.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-04-10, 06:25:

Itll come back just not as it was .. the new tech I'm hearing about for recording to optical media increases its storage to two hundred terabytes for standard single layer DvD sized discs...imagine discs with dual or triple layers with 600 terabytes of storage.

That's interesting. I never understood why optical technology stalled while HDDs just kept getting bigger and cheaper.

My first HDD was 32 MB (not GB) so this is all amazing to me.