[me551ah]

If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.

But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.

[Humorist2290]

To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.

When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.

[criddell]

You can play them, but the license gives you no right to transfer ownership. This feels like a huge problem to me, especially with ebooks.

I’d love to see regulation around guaranteeing consumers the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods in a similar way to the analog counterpart.

[jrmg]

I think this is a big element. I’ve been feeling this a bit too. I’ve been a physical-game buyer in the past - usually saving money by buying used games.

But I’m not going to keep a collection of old consoles in my living room, so at this point it feels more likely that I will be able to actually play games further into the future if I buy digitally.

This is the opposite of what proponents of physical media heavily argue - indeed, many here are making it their only argument - but I suspect it’s how lots of ‘regular people’ that aren’t saturated in digital rights politics feel.

[Departed7405]

You just need to keep the discs,not the console. if it's not retro-compatible then you aren't going to be able to play on the console because of architecte differenczs.

But the PS5 can play PS4 games, early PS3 could play PS2 games and so on. And Xbox is entirely retro-compatible because they used the same architecture.

[hx8]

I own a decent library of retro games, sized in the hundreds.

Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.

[downrightmike]

Sure, but they keep raising the price of everything. And in a world where ram and STORAGE are at a multiple premium, deleting high density discs is completely outside of reality

[jrmg]

they keep raising the price of everything

Games are much cheaper in real terms (even in terms of percentage of wages/income, if you don’t believe that’s kept up with inflation generally) than they’ve ever been.