this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
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Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. Consoles will break down. 50 years from now there'll be too much history to keep making copies of everything worth saving. If we do want a video game preservation law, make it digital.
Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than ~20 years, or if the parent company goes under. Online games should be required to make an offline mode patch before shutting down.
As a related example, my parents have a bunch of bookshelves packed with everything they bought over the years. And as a kid I never touched any of it because the books had become all gross and yellowed. Physical game archives will last a couple decades longer but in the end it'll be the same result.
didnt even think about that.. but how do university libraries for example then keep up their valuable - or even more interesting - their non valuable old inventory? Never thought that degration was THAT potent
CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a "physical copy" of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.
how u do a nice cover like that tho?
I mean even as a trained media designer: this is rather lot of work