Physical media is not real preservation
Mom and daughter both have points but kinda miss the mark. Ultimately, there's a certain kind of magic that physical media offers. Something about having a hands-on copy of a disc and being able to see its covers and art is really special. Even if it's not producing a unique sound signature, unlike vinyl which colors records with distortion, CDs provide a special experience to the listener.
At the same time, they're incredibly inconvenient. You have to remember to lug them around, and they're fairly fragile. If you move them around, they skip or present other issues. They're not a sustainable way to preserve a collection of music you love.
There's a middle ground here, and it's something that's thankfully entirely possible with physical music mediums like vinyl and CD: burn or record them! Being able to backup music you care about ensures that it's resistant against the natural fragilityof these mediums. Ideally, you'd follow the 3-2-1 backup rule.
- 3 copies of data
- On 2 different types of media
- With 1 copy being away from home
You can encourage tons of people to copy their music collection onto an external hard drive or two and maybe upload it to a popular cloud service. This ensures a level of resilience with your music that's impossible to replicate with having a bunch of CDs or records stuffed in a box.
Music is generally pretty accessible. Worst case scenario, often times the music you enjoy can be pulled up on YouTube. Most people do not have equipment to distinguish the difference between a lossy MP3 of the music they enjoy and a solid 320kbps. Nobody can meaningfully distinguish anything past 320kbps. Losing a music collection can mean years of lived experiences are suddenly gone. But that music will never disappear.
Platforms like Spotify lock their music behind DRM, which is really stupid. However, there are robust alternatives to Spotify that prevent this kind of anti-consumer behavior.
Video games are different
Video games are DRM-laden nightmares. Consoles have aggressive anti-piracy protection. You often times can't just rip a game disc to a hard drive anymore. You can't really back anything up, and both alternatives are terrible in different ways. Let's look at the situation with a focus on consoles:
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Physical games give you a decent amount of control over when you want to be able to access a game, and provide resilience against game stores suddenly erasing titles you enjoy out of existence or changing things you like about them.
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However, there is no real way to back them up. Copying the data onto the console's own storage is not resilient as you're now depending on a single system to preserve your games that could at any point fail. You will lose access to your physical games in the case of a house fire, potentially a flood, or just gradual physical damage like scratches and scuffs. Physical games are also hard to get ahold of in the case that they cease being reprinted. The resale value is compelling, but with physical games there is a certain point where older titles become notoriously overpriced and inaccessible to normal people. Keep in mind that there is NO DIFFERENCE between a physical game's contents and a digital game's, as video games are an inherently digital form of media. With physical discs, you can often be straight up extorted arbitrary amounts of money for a non-scarce item.
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Digital games offer a level of convenience that you can't get with physical. Want to pre-order a game and play it the very same second it comes out? Go right ahead. They also offer a level of resilience against various physical damage and environmental disasters. As long as you can log into your PSN or Xbox or Nintendo account, you can acess any of the games present on the store at that point in time.
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However, you have even less control over what games you can play and how you can enjoy them. If you want to experience a game at a certain point before it was patched, if you want the ability to quickly share games with a friend, or if you want to be able to sell games when you're done with them, you can't feasibly do any of this as seamlessly as you can with physical media. Additionally, and maybe most importantly, vendors will frequently delist games off their digital stores for various reasons.
Ultimately, the locked-down nature of consoles ensures that no form of media is truly resilient and everything is ephemeral. They're just too tied to DRM and anyone that argues to you that their collection of physical console games is preservation is missing the point.
PC... master race?
I like to shit on PC gaming as of recent for its many shortcomings, but one of the things that the PC platform offers over consoles consistently is resilience and control. Ignoring media for a second, you have very tight fine-grained control over a lot of aspects of your (gaming) computer. RAM sticks fail or you just want a higher capacity? Just swap 'em out. Storage died? Easy fix. Graphics card isn't enough for your needs? Simple, just sell the old one and buy something faster. It's a modular platform that comes with its own tradeoffs.
This trickles down to software distribution, although this is getting worse. Even the most DRM-packed Denuvo-infested games can be downloaded on Steam, BACKED UP to any kind of cold storage you like, and preserved as your own self-contained collection. This is superior to the digital game collection on consoles and offers advantages over physical console game collections.
The big disadvantage with Steam is that your Denuvo games (assuming every game you're buying has Denuvo or some similar DRM) will often times not launch without a stable Internet connection. This is disgusting. Additionally, there's the obvious lack of being able to hold a physical item and appreciate artbooks or manuals and resell your games. They don't retain value.
The advantages are numerous, in that you actually have some level of control over the files present in your game, and can utilize mods, restoration patches, and graphical enhancements. They can also be stored on a filesystem for normal people like FAT32, NTFS, ext4, btrfs, ZFS, APFS, etc. instead of a proprietary format that you can only access via console.
If we look past Denuvo games or games with restrictive DRM, this online requirement is no longer present. Now, we have the advantages of potential resilience against natural phenomena, resilience against your vendor delisting games in the future, resilience against scalping and overcharging, and resilience against becoming unobtainium in some countries. Of course, the lack of physicality is still present.
It is important to keep in mind that a lot of DRM-heavy PC games are cracked and become functionally DRM-free. Going through every possible option right now, it seems to me like the best, most resilient option and the one that encourages preservation the most is a DRM-free space. Physical and digital mediums of obtaining games have their issues, but ultimately without the ability to control the media you purchase in any meaningful way, it's secondary to this issue.
Similar to how one can rip a CD collection and back it up in a million places, PCs offer the ability to easily preserve media years into the future. A game collection stored on a couple data centers will outlast the average physical disc by years and years.