Why Physical Media Is Still Important

By Cyfir

In this day and age, physical media is becoming a dying medium. Most media has gone mostly digital. When you think of getting the latest album from your favorite band, getting the latest PC game, or buying a new movie, there’s a huge chance that you don’t think about heading to your local mall anymore. Instead, you likely think about downloading a new song on a service like iTunes, downloading a new game on Steam, or streaming a movie on a service like Netflix or Vudu. One of the last vestiges of physical media has been console games. Every major home video game console save for one has shipped with a disc drive or cartridge or card (etc.) slot up until this point. The Xbox One S All Digital Edition was the first major video game console derivative to skip physical media. This holiday season, the PlayStation 5 will release along with it’s all digital counterpart. Many are predicting that this will be the last console generation with physical media, and with at least one major video game company reporting that 80% of their sales are now digital, I don’t doubt it.

With all that said, I still believe that physical media is still very important, and that’s because we’ve already seen the downfalls of going “all digital.” For one, what do you think happens once the service that you downloaded your media from goes away and you no longer have the hardware you downloaded it on? That’s right. It’s gone. You never owned a copy of it and you’ll never have access to it again unless you buy it again on another platform. If you don’t think that this happens, dust off your old Nintendo Wii and try to buy a game from the eShop. You can’t because it’s no longer there. If your internal memory on the Wii fails, all those games you spent money on downloading over the course of the console’s life cycle are now gone. For some, this may not be a big deal, but some games are only released on the online shops. For video game preservationists, this is a nightmare. There have been many instances of where an unreleased or rare game has been discovered in someone’s attic and preserved online for others to enjoy. Unfortunately, if everything were to go digital, this just wouldn’t be possible in the future.

While digital delivery has a place in preservation, there needs to be a physical copy found to preserve. While I’ve mainly focused on video games here, these same arguments can be applied to any form of media. We have backed up recordings of old VHS tapes on YouTube for anyone to find and enjoy. Some of these VHS tapes are rare and would not be accessible by the general public otherwise. The problem is that media companies, in many cases, are not concerned with preserving their own history. They are more concerned with making money because they are a business. The artists creating these works usually have no control over what happens to them because they work for the companies.

If all media were to go digital, there would be many things that would be lost to time forever. Imagine losing the works of Beethoven to time because no one had a physical copy of his written notes and the servers that they were stored on were taken offline and erased forever. While digital media definitely has its advantages, physical media shouldn’t be forgotten or abandoned. I’ve downloaded plenty of games to my steam library and on my Nintendo Switch, but when it comes to games that I really care about, I’m going to get it physically and display it proudly on my shelf. If there’s an album from a band that I really care about, I’m getting a physical CD and enjoying that new CD smell for as long as I can. Physical media cannot be completely replaced. When the PlayStation 5 comes out, I’m getting the one with the disc drive.

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Cyfir