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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>Would I lose everything I paid for?

I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago and I don't know how many hard drives have given up on me over that time.

Valve and the contract you have with them is actually more durable than stuff physically lying around the house, it just doesn't feel that way because we don't have a good intuition about how brittle digital information stored on physical media is.

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> I probably don't have access to over 95% of games I bought as physical copies 20 years ago

I don't have access to 100% of my physical games because I haven't had an optical drive since 2012 and certainly don't have any of my old hard drives.

Obviously, I know I could get one for under $20, but why?

Back when I first got an xbox, I got the Halo remastered collection or something like that on DVD. Wanted to fire it up again ... no idea where the disc is. Wish I had just gotten digital at this point.

I discovered that I could actually add many of the games I bought on physical media in Steam and/or other services by using the serial key inside the case. Still it doesn't help if you can't find the case either... and not all games could be activated this way.

Hmm - that's handy. After a move, I'm sure I have the disc somewhere ... it's just in some box somewhere. I will have to give that a try when I find it.

Don't worry about finding the DVD, it would have degraded by now anyway. Normal DVDs have a lifespan of 10-20 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

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