Call me old fashioned but I expect games to come on physical media, be able to enjoy multiplayer on a LAN and be able to enjoy them long after the company who created them is gone.
the lack of optical drives in consoles isn't because the tech is 'dated' it's because forcing users to online-only and preventing players from owning physical media they can let their friends borrow or sell used makes more money for gaming companies and gives them greater opportunity to collect your data and push ads at you. It gives them greater control to censor, patch, and remove content too.
Optical drives in computers can also be a nightmare for consumers. Try playing 4k bluray content on your PC for example. It wouldn't be unreasonable for people to complain to Dell that they bought a computer with an optical drive but can't play the media they own without jumping through hoops due to DRM like this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/606652/4k-blu-ray-support-is... so Dell saves themselves a lot of problems by removing those drives.
Not true, because publishers or other middlemen can't censor the games that are on my shelf. My shelf also won't remove music from my games after license disputes arise. My shelf doesn't care if my ISP is down or if cloudflare experiences an outage either.
If I burn down my shelf, or step on a disk I'm on the hook for replacing the games. Physical media comes with its own vulnerabilities, but at least those are mainly in my control.
Sure they can. Tons of games sold on physical disk only had part of the game on the disk, with the remainder requiring internet access to download. Particularly more recent AAA games that are tens of gigabytes.
The fact that the companies selling the media make it useless without an account is a different, though absolutely material, discussion. It’s been a slow March, though, from “this is your unsecured audio disc and you can use it and copy it within fair use and sell it if you want”, then DVDs in 1996 with “you can use and play this disc if your hardware with this idiotic, fatally flawed encryption scheme says you can” - quickly amended via the DMCA in 1998 with “well, we meant as long as we and your hardware says you can, and if you break that it’s Bad”, then continuing on to later physical disc formats with other, still idiotic and fatally flawed encryption schemes. You could still sell your disc though, or loan it to your friends.
Now? Yeah, it’s all lies about it being a purchase, all the way down. How it would be nice, though, to see a court bitch-slap Amazon and Apple, and force them to facilitate your doctrine of first sale right for the Kindle ebooks and iTunes Store media you “purchased”.
As much as I dislike companies having the ability to revoke licenses and ownership, the climate impact of physical media means they should remain firmly in the past.
I’m more curious about why people think things ought to be preserved forever at all costs? I’m sure there are many video games from the 70’s and 80’s that have been forgotten.