Physical media is dead, long live physical media: Balancing physical games and digital games

For a large portion of my life, I told myself that if I were to collect physical games, I was a preservationist. I, personally, was helping to keep video games safe. I would pick up anything that I didn’t already own that would look good on a shelf.

The hundreds of physical game boxes, disks, and cartridges hoarded in my bedroom were important to saving video games as a whole. What if my boxed, complete copies of Major League Baseball or Utopia for the Intellivision or Destruction Derby for the PlayStation were eventually the last in existence?

My big box PC copy of Shannara was going to eventually wind up in a museum! I was sure of it! I was wrong. I’m older and wiser, now, and I was dead wrong.

But, the more I learned about actual preservationists and game museums, the more I realized that I had the spirit, but my stack of old Turbografix-16 boxed games was just for my own good and no one else’s. When I figured that out, it was oddly freeing.

At that point, I decided to collect physical games for the sake of myself only and for educational purposes. I opted to enjoy the games that I owned by (brace yourselves!) playing them.

But, having been such a staunch protester against digital games for the majority of my life at that point, I began to learn the joys of both physical media and digital media. I came to terms with the idea that digital games might actually be the way to preserve games. Thus, I was much more open to the idea of buying a game directly through a console’s digital storefront. 

I also realized that physical media is, unfortunately, a dying art and that there are too many classic games that just aren’t available for people to play anymore in any capacity. But, how can we strike a balance?

That’s where we need to break down the importance of both digital and physical media and some thoughts on how they should work together in the future to help preserve history and to give access to a much wider library of content. 

Game preservation isn’t an exact science, but it is archival and touches on a lot of topics.

You can’t talk about the debate between digital games and physical games without first talking about game preservation. But, what is “preservation” and what can we do to help it that isn’t just keeping a collection of various games on a shelf in your living room?

The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that focuses on exactly this. They come with broad strokes, studies, and more concentrated initiatives.

For instance, they recently handled a study that found that 87% of historical games do not have easy access in 2023. Let me repeat that number: eighty-seven percent. That’s almost all of them in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, some games get digital and physical re-releases every so often, sometimes with a fresh coat of paint, such as Nintendo’s recent Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Sometimes games just get modern ports, almost entirely staying with their classic look and feel, such as many old Final Fantasy games. I’m a fan of when they do both, such as Day of the Tentacle Remastered.

The Video Game History Foundation also went into detail on how they conducted that study and how these re-releases were taken into account for their numbers. 

But, companies, for some reason or another, sit on physical games never released digitally that people are looking to preserve (and sometimes actually play). The unfortunate reality is that game preservation can oftentimes be on murky legal grounds. Since publishers own those rights, licensing can stop games from getting a re-release and can get swept under the rug for decades.

The Foundation is doing the work to preserve the history of the game industry, among other groups fighting for the right causes. In fact, well-established film directors recently called out a similar situation in the movie industry. Guillermo del Toro and Christopher Nolan are big advocates of physical media, with del Toro going as far as saying that owning films is a “responsibility”, for instance. 

The world we live in isn’t so black and white.

The unfortunate reality is that physical media has had a real clear distinct lack of representation in a post-pandemic era. While it wasn’t the catalyst, the pandemic exacerbated an already established problem of game companies preferring to go digital.

During quarantine and unsurprisingly, game companies, much like movie theaters, were afraid of losing money. 

They figured that gamers were more likely to buy directly from their console because it was easier and safer than getting physical games from their local Target at the time. I’d love to say that digital sales were through the roof to prove their point, but both physical and digital both did amazing during 2020, according to studies by NPD.

The pandemic didn’t actually slow down physical game sales either. People were just more likely to buy them online and have them shipped directly to their door. However, digital sales have, if you look at the bigger picture, entirely overshadowed physical sales since then.

This isn’t exclusive to gaming. Between the rise of streaming services over movie stores (RIP Blockbuster) and Best Buy’s CD aisle going entirely missing recently, this is across the board.

So, what gives? Simply, it’s an answer of cost for a lot of game developers. While most AAA publishers want their games to be as widespread as possible, indies or smaller budget games in general (even those published by AAA publishers) have to look at the cost-benefit of getting their game put onto a disc or cartridge versus just dropping it onto a digital store. And, honestly, it’s not worth it most of the time.

While it’s incredibly difficult to determine exact numbers due to the nature of secrecy and contracts, Japanese game consultancy firm Kantan Games had a great breakdown of examples and potential pricing structure for a $70 game in both physical and digital, back in 2020.

Dr. Serkan Toto explained in the article that making a game physical for the same price ends up giving much less profit. And as much as I’d adore the idea that people make games out of the kindness of their hearts as passion projects, most people who put in that much time and effort want to maximize their revenue, even the small devs. Sorry, it’s just how the market works.

Knowing this, studies have found that more games have gone entirely digital in the past few years, with Steam and itch.io being major options. Capcom announced that the vast majority of their sales were now on digital markets, for instance, so even AAA companies are noticing it, too.

When you realize you aren’t actually helping anyone; you’re hoarding.

I used to collect physical games, peripherals, merchandise, and systems, pushing nearly 40 different game consoles in my home, tons of weird pre-order bonuses and memorabilia, and hundreds upon hundreds of physical games at its height across the entire history of gaming.

Needless to say, that many physical games took up a lot of room, especially since a lot of it was still boxed. A lot of times, the games and consoles would have to fit awkwardly on several shelves or be stuck living in storage bins due to unwieldy shapes and sizes. It was not ideal.

Eventually, I sold off the majority of my collection to make room for necessities and other trinkets that I collected. It was surprisingly freeing and made moving a heck of a lot easier. But, the more I think about it, the more I realize that some of those games just don’t have easy ways to play them in 2024.

I always think of weird things in my collection that I could have made a difference with, like the SimCity Graphics sets. I had both the Set 1: Ancient Cities and Set 2: Future Cities expansions for the DOS version of SimCity, which were rarities and great fodder for preservation when I got my hands on them nearly a decade and a half ago from a flea market booth. Back then, very little was out there in terms of information and preservation on the internet. 

In any case, I did nothing with them, keeping them in my collection until, to my unnecessary surprise, they eventually became way more accessible in the wild and were no longer entirely lost as media. I didn’t have the knowledge or means to “preserve” them at the time, aside from learning everything I could about them from limited sources and decade-old forums.

I never actually played those expansions or, frankly, most of the physical games that were in my collection. They were shelf warmers. No matter what I told myself, that isn’t preservation and did no one any good, all the way up until the day I sold the majority of them off. I had a weird rarity that I could have helped flesh out information on and, sadly, I didn’t.

The reality of physical games versus digital games is, unsurprisingly, just so murky.

I know I’m going to get a lot of flack for saying this, but digital media is an important part of the future of gaming and acquiring new gamers. Needless to say, that also causes a lot of problems when publishers pull a game from their catalog, such as many old Xbox 360 Live Arcade titles like the X-Men arcade game.

It took the entire fanbase to move a mountain for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game, which was entirely digital, originally, and removed from the digital markets when Ubisoft willed it. It, eventually, got re-released years later and even copped a physical release at that time.

Of note, mobile games also come to mind when it comes to preservation. While it’s harder (but not impossible) to scrub a PC or console game from the internet, mobile games come and go constantly.

I immediately think of various games I’ve played over the years, such as Avatar Legends, that get a big release on mobile phones and eventually (sometimes suddenly) vanish. Obviously, these would never have a chance due to having no physical game released.

A large swath of gamers like to have their physical game collections on hand to be able to play or to just collect. But, the reality of the 2020s is that many people just don’t have the space, patience, or necessity to carry around their games anymore. Aside from just downloading a digital game to your console, the rise of cloud gaming across every company you can name wants to cash in on these exact people for these exact reasons.

I believe that one important aspect that gamers should take away from this is that we can’t shame people for going one way or another. When I was younger, 20+ years ago, I’d have my CD case slung around my shoulder, full of games that I’d take with me anywhere I went. That is, I did, all the way until the day those games were stolen out of the case and I lost everything I was playing at the time. I learned my lesson quickly.

But, as you get older, less can be more. While I still have quite a few physical games on a shelf, I also have hundreds of games in my Steam library (as well as various other places), most of which never got a shot to be physical due to some developer or publisher limitation.

If you want a beautiful library in your home, there’s nothing wrong with that and I bet it looks amazing. You can go as far as encapsulate them and get them graded from numerous companies that handle that, if they’re in good enough shape. If you insist on personal preservation, it’s well worth your time to protect them, if nothing else.

If you just don’t have the room to store dozens to hundreds of physical games in your tiny apartment or need the room for other things, you can also still be a gamer. Don’t let the gatekeepers tell you otherwise. Just know that there are risks to being entirely digital.

Unfortunately, modern publishers and developers are going to put out games in the way that only they intend and nothing else. The good news is that if a digital-only game gets popular enough, you can let them know that you want it as a physical game release and they (sometimes) may look into doing that with companies like Limited Run.

In the meantime, we need to support groups like the Video Game History Foundation that are fighting the good fight on our behalf for the future of both retro and modern games. They’re preserving history, piece by piece, using quickly deteriorating hardware and systems. And, if we’re being honest here, the future of keeping physical games preserved is, ironically, digital.

While the Video Game History Foundation is among our favorite gaming non-profits, we have another handful of charities we are big fans of here on Comfy Cozy Gaming. You should check them all out because they’re all amazing.