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It can't suddenly disappear from your shelf (europe.pub)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.world
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[–] 40 points 4 days ago (11 children)

Actually, in the case of discs, it can.

Say it with me everyone, "Optical media bad!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

Unfortunately, playing a burned copy requires modifying your hardware.

Most of you are probably too young to remember, but back then, the fact that Sony chose optical media and implemented DRM on the PlayStation was very controversial to people who knew the implications of those decisions. Unfortunately, that number of people was, and remains, very small.

Every disc copy of every game is a ticking time bomb, and the only way to defuse it is to make an unauthorized backup copy, then hack your PS1 to play the copy. There is no way to slow, prevent, or reverse the eventual decay of the data on the original disc.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 days ago (4 children)

    This ignores the underlying issue this post was about. Games being sold on physical media will likely last longer than games sold as digital downloads.

    If you store a professionally pressed optical disc in an environment with good temperature control and low humidity, it may last 50 - 100 years. Only about 10% of pressed optical discs fail in under 25 years. Meanwhile, companies like Sony will take down their storefronts with little to no thought.

    Yes, for backups, you're better off storing bin/cue files than trusting a cheap burned disc that will only last 1-5 years. But games getting sold with physical disc gives people the ability to rip them.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago

    If you store a professionally pressed optical disc in an environment with good temperature control and low humidity, it may last 50 - 100 years.

    Reduce that to like 1 to maybe 5 years if it was being played in an original X-Box with a Thompson disc drive. (If ya know, ya know.)

    I'm still salty about being so careful with all my discs and watching Crimson Skies and Halo: Combat Evolved load backwards before showing "Disc Read Error."

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    Games being sold on physical media will likely last longer than games sold as digital downloads.

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    Eh, that's just the shitty organic medium they cheap out with. Metal dyes (M-Disc Blurays are 100GB good for 100 years, fine even for modern games) are great, shame they're artificially expensive.

    Newer glass or quartz optical discs with femtosecond lasers are good for 360TB for 100K years (claimed) in a similar footprint. See also M$ sitting on 'Project Silica' for most of a decade.

    Shame corpos don't want the CD burning revolution to happen again, just imagine what sneakernet would be like if you could fit all of Netflix in the palm of your hand burned on a USB peripheral.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    There is no way to slow, prevent, or reverse the eventual decay of the data on the original disc.

    Maybe no way to prevent it or reverse it, but I bet there are ways that could slow it. Preventing exposure to light -- especially sunlight -- probably helps. And if you kept them at very low temperatures (like in a freezer), that would probably help as well. Pretty much every physical/chemical process slows down at lower temperatures.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago

    I was first excited for digital to replace vinyl and then for magnetic media mostly biting the dust, then latter for optical burning (heh) out. Anyone wanting to go back to the old days didn't have to actual hassle with old tech.

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