10,000 Bulletins: No One Can Stop the Presses! (Part 1)

still, half those games are stone classics, a good record for any publisher

look at that picture of obsolete physical discs in front of a wood-paneled television, this is vinyl fetishization in an even sicko-er form

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which half of that post did i bloodpotion

nobody knows

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Physical discs aren’t obsolete. Physical media is more important than ever in a world where every corporation is trying to limit the control we have of our own tech and media.

That said, collector fetishism blows and ever increasing scarcity of actually affordable physical media in favor of deluxe collectors editions made to con people into thinking they’ll be valuable in the future is depressing.

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I buy physical discs whenever possible, but a physical release of a digital-only game years after it came out for an obsolete console strikes me as a bit perverse. I don’t think it makes the data any more likely to survive the decades

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At least PS5 has backward compatibility this time around.

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Yeah but check out this sick disc organizer I got. If I don’t have enough games it doesn’t look as good.

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unfortunately the first part of this statement is deeply untrue even if there’s a lot of truth to the second half in principle – bit rot of optical discs is not going to get any better, and if you want your local copies of whatever consumer media to actually work independently of some streaming licensing dragnet, you should really just steal and/or rip them

private torrent trackers are in practice infinitely better stewards of the cultural record than any boutique or commercial project otherwise could be

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Yeah I believe bit rot has gotten to (apparently poorly-printed?) blu-rays. So even recent stuff isn’t safe

I think Tigress was trying to get at “physical discs aren’t obsolete in the sense that MiniDisc is (sadly) obsolete” and not “physical discs have an expiration date”.

Although, only releasing limited run collector’s editions of non-AAA games is only going to make physical media less accessible to the masses and help accelerate how quickly physical media becomes obsolete.

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also, are these physical discs even useful outside of environments that still have to validate DRM to patch executables, etc.? it’s honestly a farce imo, just release an art book

should amend this statement to include that public sector orgs do a much better job of preservation with media that isn’t film/games/audio/etc. that at one time had a commercial release, but it’s stuff that was commercially released that we always wind up talking about

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i gasped

Magnet video’s US release of Red Cliff international (two films like God and Woo intended) has a print error on every single disc! I went through 4 returns, saw others complaining, and had to eventually torrent it to get the zither duel I crave

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DLC, DRM, and you a lesser extent patching all got big because they devalued physical media so…I don’t think this is a great critique of physical stuff.

And I do suspect since all of the games in this collection have been complete for at least a year patching isn’t going to be an issue for any of them.

Regardless, wether this specific set is stupid or not isn’t really my point. I specifically hate that physical media is all boutique now!

I also always hear bit rot come up even though it has literally only affected one disc I own out of hundreds? All of which are on discs that have lasted longer than any hard drive I have ever bought.

Entropy will claim everything, but it has objectively claimed less of my books, DVDs, and games, than it has hard drives.

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hard drives should never ever not be replicated – I know this conversation inevitably makes assumptions around consumers not wanting to spend $$$ and think about sysadminning, which is all entirely reasonable, but a bookshelf full of old game spines is in every way a worse practice than a raid array.

also my point about patching was that it’s totally unreasonable to not expect software to need patching moving forward, so having something on physical media when the physical media represents only the DRM license and the assets is almost doubly irrelevant for consumer rights.

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obviously keep buying physical books though I’m not a monster, just pointing out that this hobby is conveniently as incompatible with sentimentality around one-off physical media as it is with, uh, intelligent mainstream cultural criticism

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I appreciate the comically grim realism of physical PC releases that contain:

  • slip of paper with Steam key
  • air, in rough measure 78% N, 21% O, 1% other
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Physical media is coming back as soon as this new silica crystal media is scaled up (I hope).

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But what an aroma!

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i just saw a post about this but apparently it’s been in dev since at least 2018.



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