Before streaming, I was a big DVD collector. I bought nearly a thousand movies. I thought I was building a library. And I will tell you a secret: DVDs rot. The glue that holds the layers together can become opaque so the laser doesn’t read the disc properly or it can simply degrade so the disc falls apart or it can warp or expand so the disc won’t spin properly in the drive. So, in addition to needing to keep antique hardware with delicate moving parts in working order to play these games or watch these movies, the media itself is degrading. Yeah, your purchased digital movie might get deleted from the network over rights issues at some point in the future or the service that provides it might shut down. But if you buy a BluRay and put it on a shelf for five years and then decide to watch it, there is a decent chance it won’t work. I love a beautiful Criterion movie box set or a game with cool box art and a manual as much as the next guy, but people overly romanticize physical media. The universe is governed by entropy and everything is falling apart.

I completely understand where you’re coming from, but for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings Which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing. Most importantly though, as we saw from PlayStation this past week, if the media we buy is only digital, it can be taken away from us at a moment’s notice with no recourse. Imagine that, one day your entire library of games could be deleted overnight because technically you don’t own it.