lostsilver wrote:
physical media is better than digital media, like for example, i want to own a green day american idiot cd so i can listen to their songs without having to go on amazon music/apple music/etc! and most games that my friends and i have are physical media too! physical media as a whole is cool, and i think that everyone should dive into the world of it at some point in their lives
honestly the "everyone should try physical media at some point in their lives" line has killed me inside as I realize that there are peopel younger than me that did not grow up with physical media
physical media is good for 2 things:
1- conservation
2- it can be cheaper if you resell it in the future
I do think most things that can afford to do it should have some sort of physical backup, not even a commercial product, just 4 hard drives stored in some supercomputer somewhere that we know for certain it is not going offline so that it will always be accessible. While it's true that most people dont really go back and consume really obscure things that we can only consume thanks to preservation, it should still be done as it's cool to preserve human history, and there are cases where someone really starts shining in a certain field but like a lot of their early work has been lost to time
now, the second one is more for a friend of mine that does do that sort of stuff than for myself. You can buy a game, beat it, and then sell it second hand at the store and make back part of the purchase, or you can just buy the game itself second hand for cheap. While is considered to be a grey area as no money is being given to the original creator, it's still a way to make certain fields more accessible
however, physical media also has dissadvantages, mainly, it can break, physical space, and accesibility
My family owned a wii and a gamecube as I was growing up, I mainly remember playing with the wii as I was a very small child when the gamecube era was ongoing. In many times, due to me just really loving a game and putting it into the wii disk drive thousands of time, the will would not read the disk, so now you had to bring up cleaning materials and clean the disk and just pray that there isn't any damage made to the disk itself. I will admit, this happeend more often than not as a kid because I was a kid, now that i'm legally considered an adult, I am more careful with physical media, however, this still can happen, one accident, or you just losing track of the certain product and not being able to track it back and it's just gone forever
Second problem, space. While it's cool to have an entire bookshelf dedicated to books, there will be a certain point when you just run out of space in the bookshelf, and now either you must spend more money and cram more your house to hold more books, or you throw out some older books or other objects with the goal of fitting in more books. This is more minor of a problem, however, in my case, if I had every manga/anime i've read in physical, I would not have space in my room for it.
The third and last problem I personally have with physical media is the accesibility of it. With digital you can just buy it any time at any moment, in fact, a lot of the time you dont even have to buy the product, (making me able to consume manga without having to spend 7000€). However with physical, a lot of the time will happen that I just try to buy a certain product and it is just not being sold on my town, so now I must start traveling around to really buy it, and then you're just paying extra in transporation, and also you're tied to store schedules and it running out and whatever, it's just a lot harder to obtain than a digital copy
my final opinion: I think physical media should exist for the sake of conservation but it is way better for me if the main way of distribution is digital
