Last month, November, was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales month what with Black Friday and all, November 2025 was the worst November in video game hardware unit sales, and the worst in physical software dollar sales the U.S. has seen since 1995.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic digital media can’t exist because the data has to be stored on something physical eventually.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?