Quote Originally Posted by Tanooki View Post
Your point being? Unless you've run down to the point of having no more copies around to buy, it can be easily replaced. A digital rental can vanish once the support is gone, a 30 year old cart I can go buy another.

I'd be on board with digital if any of it was allowed to be copied and backed up for later use allowing me to control what I spend my money on. Steam is kind of like that as you can store the downloads but it's stuck with that crap loader, but GoGames.com has individual installers so anything there you can buy and keep to reinstall whether they continue to keep it up there or not (for purchase.) Recently Fallout dropped off there, but if you bought it, it's in your locker or you kept a copy of the installer.
My point was simply that your point about owning a physical disc until the day you die is not the same thing as still owning a functioning copy of the game. All physical media, at least of the consumer variety that most of us own, will eventually decay and become non-functional. You also don't know what the availability of physical copies of older games will be in 30-50 years. It's quite possible with some low print run titles that a physical copy of a game cannot be easily replaced. Indeed, even if the media still works, finding something to play it on could be a challenge. As such, I believe digital media (DRM free being critical as others have pointed out) is the superior means of assuring that those games are still around decades and centuries into the future.