Have you had discs go bad purely from age?

They should last 25+ years, I have some cds from the 1980's that still work. Also pretty sure others online have demonstrated original laser discs that still work (the ones that pre date CDs from 1978).

I'm far more confident that Blu-ray discs will still be working 30 years from now (assuming one takes good care of it and stores it properly) than I am that some digital games would still be available to download in 30 years.

Never once heard of discs going bad. If so it's some dumb user error

Like forgotten passwords or stuff getting lost, broken or stolen - there's always some point where you can say "that's user error", but it happens nonetheless. It's good to have backups.

@storm_of_swords:

"I'm far more confident that Blu-ray discs will still be working 30 years from now (assuming one takes good care of it and stores it properly) than I am that some digital games would still be available to download in 30 years."

Unless you buy digital games from some sketchy site, you should be fine. Besides, not everyone deletes what they've downloaded. At least in my case with PSN, I never deleted anything I downloaded.

Now I’m nervous to take my Saturn collection out of the basement.

Do you know what has a far shorter lifespan than Blu-rays? The answer is Hard Drives, so it doesn't matter if you never delete anything that you've downloaded because the Hard Drive that you currently have the games saved on is eventually going to go bad far sooner than a properly cared for Blu-ray disc ever will. And then what do you after your Hard Drive goes bad and you go to re-download your games onto a new Hard Drive but you can't because the PSN service might no longer be active in the future.

And that's not even taking into account that digital games could also be removed due to licenses expiring and there is nothing that you can do about it. With Blu-ray discs, you would still be able to play the game.

Well obviously if you take care of discs that can help vs. someone who doesn't.

But even if you do take care of your discs, some of them will be out of our control. With movies I know there have been certain "batches" of discs that went bad due to "rot" - and on blu-ray.com people were identifying them by the factory (which you can tell by some very tiny numbers on the inner ring of the disc). There are certain releases which notoriously just went bad after a number of years, where the failure rate was almost certain on those releases.

But like I said, it's still pretty rare overall. Maybe 1 or 2 out of a hundred on average. The vast majority of discs should last decades if they are stored properly.

I honestly doubt companies will leave owners of digital games hanging. When my disc version of Crysis Warhead suddenly quit activating the online release date, EA issued a new executable that skipped it, period.

There are quite a few games in GoG that are approaching 30 yrs old. For example, Westwood's Eye of the Beholder is 27 years old. GoG also ensures they work with the latest new Windows operating system.

No guarantee with the Blu Ray games, especially when the supply of consoles that can play them dries up.

@storm_of_swords:

Like I said before, nothing digital has failed me yet. I've had disc games crap out on me already and rebought a few games 360/ps3 and older. Digital has already proved itself more reliable in that regard. My digital Ps1/Xbox Original games have outlived the majority of my physical libraries.

I've heard moisture damage can do this, but its pretty rare.

I did another inspection of my optical discs and so far, I've only had one disc go bad (Command & Conquer: Generals) and that's because of constant use. All that disc spinning generates a lot of heat.

But, the game and its expansion lives on in Origin digital format. I'd replay it more if I can zoom out farther with the camera. But, I can't.

That's a false equivalency and a half. If you put your hard drive through the same amount of stress your blu-ray disk goes through (read only, low bandwidth, occasional use instead of 24/7), it will last you a hundred years.

HDD is basically just a set of much more durable, higher quality disks put into an air-tight sterile case with a built-in reading/writing head.

Under HDD-level stress conditions a blu-ray disk would turn into dust in a couple of days.

I re-download it from 15 trillion other places not ran by Sony while you're blowing motes off of an altar you've built around your one and only bubble-wrapped blu-ray disk.

Infinite amount of copies > One copy.

Every single time.

We can still play classic Doom betas and alphas among a fuckton of other old games originally distributed on floppy disks. If they weren't preserved digitally, bet your ass cheeks a lion share of those would be lost to history.

You don't even have a floppy drive these days. That's exactly where your blu-ray drive's gonna be at in 30 years.

I don't think so, but I guess I haven't tried any of them in a while. I guess if you played them a lot they would degrade faster. I'd also expect the mechanism for reading the discs to be more likely to fail

I have had cartridges go bad on me though

No but my Battlefield 2 case wouldn't shut properly it's worn out from opening it so much I played the hell out of that game back in the day.

Some of my Xbox 360 games are in very bad shape the console did damage to them over time I'm convinced of that.

Even if we assume that what you just said is true, it's not a very normal situation for a HDD to have stress conditions as low as a blu-ray disk, so what's the point of this unlikely scenario that you presented?

So, in other words, your solution is piracy? Ok.

@R10nu: I can always rip all my Blu-rays and DVDs. Not possible with my UHD movies yet, though. I don't know what I'm gonna do with my games, but what difference would it make? There won't even be any hardware to play them, or the hardware will be too hard/expensive to find. The PS3s will die long before the PS3 discs go bad.

If your idea of longevity is stashing something away in a box, an HDD full of games won't do you any worse than a blu-ray disk collection.

You need to clear up on your definition of piracy. Getting access to your legitimately bought software isn't one.

But that's just your extreme hypothetical scenario of PSN vanishing into thin air. That doesn't happen. Those digital licenses would just migrate to whatever platform comes to take PSN's place with a couple months of heads-up.

I've seen enough formats die in my lifetime to cut that middle man altogether.

That's a lot of trust you're putting in Sony and whoever may put them out of business. Why are you so sure the licenses will migrate and that they will give you notice to redeem them months in advance? How do you even know the competition will have the right hardware specifications to run those games or that there will be a third party store immediately on the PlayStation operating system?

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

My idea is to continue to play my old consoles on occasion througout the years just like I still do with all of my other retro consoles that I've owned over the past 30 years. And it won't be in a box, it will be proudly on my shelf with the rest of my collection. No matter what, the stress conditions placed upon the blu-ray disks will not be anywhere near the stress conditions placed upon the HDD and the HDD will crap out long before the blu-ray discs ever do. The scenario that you presented of a HDD having stress conditions as low as a blu-ray disk is an extremely uncommon scenario that most people would never experience and is therefore pointless.

When you say that you can have an "infinite amount of copies" and can download these Sony games "from 15 trillion other places not ran by Sony", that falls under the definition of piracy.

And wow, you sure are confident that your digital licenses would just migrate over to some other platform. You really think that is some "extreme hypothetical scenario" that just "doesn't happen"? Well, let me give you a heads up on a similar scenario that is actually about to really happen this year, Nintendo will soon be shutting down the Wii Shop channel and you won't be able to re-download previously purchased digital Wii games. And those digital licenses that you purchased don't get you anything on the Switch.

I have never had an issue with discs. I always take good care of them and not once have they gone bad.

Never had it with a game but I've had it happen with a couple of music cd's from 1992.

I still play them to this day but the last 2 tracks won't play at all sadly.

Never, nothing at all. All my old DVD's still play unless scratched.

writable discs go bad-unless they're that one that's supposed to be immune to that, forget what it's called. Oh, M-Disc. Don't know for sure that they're immune, but supposedly.

I sure hope professionally made discs don't. Have never seen that so far.

Baring keeping them room temperature and whatnot, of course.

Nope, still have many of my early games cds, such USNF,Chuck's air combat and more!!!

It falls under the definition of digital goods.

You have no clue what piracy is.

Such has been my experience so far. On PC that is, which is obviously way ahead of some stone age cavemen from Nintendo on that front.

You've got a substantial heads-up about the shutdown, just like i said. So you can download and back up everything yourself in ways you see fit. The fact that Nintendo will get away with not migrating digital licenses to eShop tells you everything there is to know about Nintendo and their fans. This isn't something normal.

It means exactly what it says.

I own these

and a lot of these

and even more of these

and somehow even more of these

and even had some of these

That's a criminal amount of unusable shit and i'm just in my 30s.

So I think i'll keep my stuff digital going into the future, but you do you.

But you were talking about PlayStation, which is far sillier to be so confident in.

"Those digital licenses would just migrate to whatever platform comes to take PSN's place with a couple months of heads-up."

PC isn't comparable. There pretty much is no choice but to go digital now, and it's far easier to play the games on future hardware because they're built for the same line of operating systems and not coded for one set of specs, which also makes it easier to keep selling and supporting those game licenses.

If you watch a lot of movies, YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE. Unless you're a pirate, which has its own drawbacks. Netflix and Hulu have very limited selections. Well, there's Amazon Video, but I've heard it's shit.

I have some old PC game discs that have lost their clarity. The clear part of the plastic has gone bit milky, and this of course prevents reading of the disc.

All plastic ages this way sooner or later. Keeping discs in their cases helps, as that way light cannot get to the plastic and wreck havok.

@R10nu said:

It means exactly what it says.

I own these

Are those Syquest media? I know they're not Zip Drive or Bernoulli media. I mean, I had a Syquest SparQ drive. But, I think its media is also different from other Syquest drives.