Does average person understand that all disc media dies too? | Hacker News Reader

Does average person understand that all disc media dies too?

17 pointskingleopold57 comments

or is it too much to understand for them? this is about Sony decision about no more disc game but it applies to all disc based media.

do they think if they get the disc, they can just hold and be able to play that disk for decades or just copy to drive they have?

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Does the average person know that a physical book they bought can deteriorate with age, and pages can tear or fall out as well? But as long as they have that book in their possession, it belongs to them, and they can read it, lend it to someone else, to their heart’s content. How are discs any different? Surely a physical book is not “permanent” but it certainly has its own merit, as compared to a DRM ridden copy of a book from Amazon. Also, some people just enjoy collecting physical media.

Books are an interesting analogy: We do have books and scrolls that are hundreds of years old. And technically, those books did "deteriorate": The colors faded, pages were damaged or went missing, the whole book became much more sensitive to environmental conditions - and the scripts and languages they were written in became outdated or even lost.

And yet we can restore and preserve those books today, and experts can still read them. And occasionally, even a language that was lost completely is recovered - or a scroll that was burned in the eruption of Vesuvius: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-de...

The problem is most people don’t realize how short disc media’s lifespan is.

Books it’s very obvious when it’s deteriorating or molding, hard drives and such are not to a laymen.

> The problem is most people don’t realize how short disc media’s lifespan is.

I have audio CDs from 1990 that play just fine and look to be in tip-top condition. Not so much CDs I have burned in the 2000s, they seem to fade, clearly a different manufacturing process. However, based on my older audio CDs, it seems that, if manufacturers want to produce quality, they certainly can.

Analog audio CDs are different. Digital media fails catastrophically. Analog media fails gradually.

You can lose a lot of bits in analog audio and not notice a thing, especially as your hearing also degrades with age.

What's an Analog Audio CD?

Furthermore, a physical book (or disc) can't just be "taken away".

Books don't fail similarly as discs.

Tear a page off a book and the rest remains readable. Spill coffee on a book and you can still see the letters through the stain.

In the meanwhile make a single scratch and you can't read your CD anymore. I'm sure there are forensic technologies that restores the content of the disc but if you are just a random nobody your disc is as good as nothing.

Not to mention CD drives fail, too.

You may interpret the OP as being against physical media. But I think what he is actually after is the idea that if you have a piece of physical media, it lasts forever which is false.

Scratching discs doesn't typically render them permanently unreadable, unless the scratch gets to the metal. There are tools which resurface the discs.

> do they think if they get the disc, they can just hold and be able to play that disk for decades or just copy to drive they have?

We can legally back-up owned discs to hdd or whatever other media in my country, including to the cloud. I can use the original media or any such backups as many times as I want, forever.

We can also sell a "hard media" copy wheven we want. IP owners cannot take away that right from us. Of course you must delete your backups if you sell the original media.

With digital "purchases" neither of these is true anymore. That's where the outrage comes from.

You can legally back up digital downloads too, e.g., GoG or non DRM Steam games.

Well, for some definition of legal depending on your jurisdiction.

I think they do. Maybe not specifically how much will it last, but the average person does understand nothing they buy last literally 'forever' and they would certainly have discovered with movies, music etc. too.

With physical discs however, you gain the ability to cheaply back them up, lend them, sell them etc. and 'someone' will always have a working copy of whatever you might want.

Not so with digital only media.

To back up a video disk you need to break multiple layers of copy protection and tricks. Not something the average non-technical user can ever do. You also need local redundant storage.

Courts have upheld that you have a right to break copyright protection to preserve your purchased physical media and upheld the right to make and distribute tools to pursue this. Until the law catches up and does the same for digital you are wrong to compare digital and physical media this way.

I didn't need to do anything complicated last time I backed up a bluray, the software made it essentially "click this button then wait a while"

It's even easier to back up digital media. How is ripping a CD easier than dragging a folder to another hard drive?

Not all digital media has DRM, and I assume all game CDs now have DRM, so ironically they'd be harder to back up.

They will outlast digital access for almost all cases, which may go away anytime as Sony please, or die with the console's central server etc. This is not defendable.

Do people know CDs get scratched, start to skip and go bad? I would say at this point essentially everyone knows that. Do people know hard drives go bad? Probably most at this point know that drives fail.

While I'm not challenging the notion that it would be great to be able to copy your CD and put the content in the cloud, the reality is that we own nothing digit any more no matter how it is delivered to us. The notion that we should have a copy in the cloud is exactly what Sony is offering.

Given the practical reality, I would much rather have a CD of my game that rely on Sony but like music, that is fading into quaint obscurity. The part of the situation that really irks me is with the CD there is no secondary market and when i buy a 5 year old game from Sony they charge me 60 bucks as if it was a new release.

This - games used to regularly drop in price so that if you were patient as a kid you could get more for the same money, and not rush as much. I love rummage sales to this day because of finding so many great deals as a child, but still would save if needed for one in the store. First game I ever got within a week of launch was Yoshi's Island from a second hand store. Physical copies will eventually deteriorate, but they take some time to do so.... Most of my Atari and Coleco stuff still works.

I still have a stash of SNES ROMs along with an old zSNES emulator binary. The whole collection is less than a GB in size and can be easily copied to whatever new drives I get.

There is some irony that those games from 40 years ago will probably still be playable long after lots of the more modern games are gone for good.

I have some 1999 era DVD-ROM still working perfectly last time I checked. And I didn't put any care in storing it "properly", normal drawer. I still have musical CDs from the 90s that have been remastered 3 times by now and I prefer the original version I hold. Yes I can download some pirate mp3 version of it, but still, no Spotify or music label can remove it from my hands now.

That would have been prior to DRM that can basically brick the data

The oldest game CD-ROM discs I have are for the Amiga CD32 and were made in 1993; they still work. My PSX and Saturn games from the mid-nineties work. To say nothing of cartridges (my NES games from the 80s work), where the only issues I've faced there are that the batteries for save files that eventually die (but can be replaced).

Rossman made a good point recently that the physical vs digital argument is mostly a distraction and DRM is the real issue that needs to be focused on.

That said, there are specific legal benefits to physical media such as the principle of first sale, which digital goods do not have.

I think it is too much for you understand the other implications of not having a physical copy of your purchases...

Been doing it for 20 years on Steam, what’s there not to understand at this point? Maybe I’ll run into in the next 20.

Steam is an exception. It's privately-owned and reasonably well-managed. In another 20 years, private equity might very well take it over and give it a customary milking. You have no way of preventing the loss of access to everything you've collected over the years. The deeper you are into Steam's ecosystem, the more value can be milked from you.

The only way to access Spiderman 2 on PS5 is either through a disc, or Sony's servers and encrypted on the PS5 storage, impossible to backup or restore.

Spiderman 2 on Steam is actual files on your hard drive you can back up, copy anywhere, then you're a single Steamless or Goldberg away from being able to play your purchased game at any time, stripped of its DRM. And if Steam truly decides to fuck you over and delete all the copies of your game, they're still on thepiratebay.

Steam isn't a miracle child, and is to be distrusted just as much as any other company. It just happens to be on a platform where they can't fuck you over quite as hard.

Scratched discs can be polished, pretty much restoring them to as-new condition, and the lifetime of Blu-ray media, even recordables, is pretty impressive, as in: longer than yours or mine.

Addressing the core of your question: in my opinion, the value of abandoned games is limited: playing them is usually no fun whatsoever, if only because of the quality-of-life being very-noticeably substandard due to later innovations.

So, a couple of (reproducibly archivable) playthrough recordings may suffice for most purposes. That being said, I do think publishers should be pushed to open-source their games upon reaching end-of-life. But given that a lot of dependencies tend to be licensed, as is some (or even most) artwork, that push should be rather gentle.

The main point of campaigns like "Stop Killing Games" should be addressed through regular consumer protection: if the game you bought becomes unplayable in 2 years or less, there should be a refund. But beyond that, I'm afraid goodwill is the only way forward, not legislation.

And I'm saying this as someone who still has several playable PSP Minidiscs, alas never plays them anymore (except Loco Roco, once a year), because, well, they're no fun anymore

The oldest DVD I own is from 1996 and it still works without any problem. Take care of them and don't let them get scratched up. Rip them and make a backup.

Games are different. They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available. Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc. So it relies on the internet and service layers to actually play the game. These all probably have their own dependencies. So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no.

> They all have DRM which make it essentially encrypted with no decryption service available.

Not all do. Games for a lot of systems can be read directly from the storage media.

> Likewise, the game isn’t usually 100% contained on disc.

Only for the couple most-recent generations. But even virtually all of my PS4 games (not to mention earlier generations) are actually on the disc, playable without a download.

> So the question in my mind becomes, do game companies have an obligation to support games in perpetuity? I think when phrased that way, the answer is an obvious no.

Agreed, but I also think that if they don't have that obligation, then society doesn't have the obligation to provide copyright protection when they drop support.

Congratulations on owning one of the very first DVDs! Please take good care of it, but it sounds like you've got that covered!

Meanwhile, the OP article is about games, Sony PlayStation games in particular. These games tend to be recorded on special media, with hardware-specific copy protection steps, requiring special actions for basic preservation (which become impossible with the passage of time), leading to specific issues, hence this article, which tries to influence legislation to prevent these.

Clearly superior option is to be able to copy the game and it's content. Of course they don't allow this via DRM but this is what should be requested. Not some disc or online only. Both current options have limited lifespan.

It is not about the longevity of the medium, but control and preservation. If something is on a disk and can be played or viewed without requiring a revokable permission, then you can preserve it and access it any time you want. If you need someone's permission, then it can be taken away from you at any time.

An aluminum pressed disc will last a long time if you don't constantly swap it out. I have a PSP that hasn't played anything other than Lumines in many, many years and I expect that disc will last functionally forever, as long as I can keep the PSP running.

I know someone who still has a VCR hooked up to their TV to play their old VHS tapes.

I recently got a PS5 Pro. So far I’ve used to digitally, but am getting the optical drive for it. It will give me the option to get old discounted games in the future and let me play DVD and Blu-ray Discs. I don’t know how often I’ll do this, but I like having the option.

I also bought an external optical drive for my computer a couple years ago. I figured I’d get one while I could. It usually sits in a drawer, but I’ve run into a few situations where I want something that is only available on CD or DVD. It’s nice having the option to buy it and rip it. The alternative is losing access forever.

That's really besides the point. Everything dies. But I still have my Sega CD games that work and I actually own them.

Death very much depends on the specific media and how you treated them. I've got loads of CDs from the 90s that are absolutely fine. I've also got ones I've burnt in the late 90s, which have completely delaminated into a clear disk and and a piece of foil. I don't think I've had any pressed discs that have rotted.. but only time will tell (I suspect Laserdiscs were fine, until they weren't). You can pick up archival BR disks though, if you're concerned about longevity. This is what you're concerned about, right?

If you know what you're doing, you put anything important on an M-disc.

Everything else is prone to random flaking. Some discs last much longer than others, but there is not always an easy way to know in advance unless you do a deep dive on the state of manufacturing at the place and time it was made (if such info is even available).

Environmental conditions can also have an effect.

I think most people who have crossed paths with a lot of optical media over the years are aware of this, but your average consumer? Probably not.

It’s not even clear if you’re saying its playback will be unsupported at some point? Or the media itself has a shelf life?

If I use a disc to backup family photos, will it experience bit rot? I suspect no. Is there a potential that no software supports JPEG in the future? Sure, everyone knows that’s possible. I use JPEG over other technologies because I feel it has a lower chance of getting obsoleted into obscurity.

>Does average person understand that all disc media dies too?

Media on disks can be copied to fresh disks, and generally even the cheapest of disks will last a long time if stored properly. Digital media* on the other hand is subject to DRM insanity and legalese that states you are buying a "license" for a product rather than the product itself.

I was on the fence in the discussion about physical video games because since 10-15 years ago 99% of the games I have purchased are digital (blame Steam). And also any physical game you buy today already has a day one patch waiting for you so arguably the game on the disc is somewhat "defective" as it is.

But I hadn't thought about things that will also die with no physical media:

- Lending a game to a friend - Second hand market - Retro computing collecting (think that ub 20+ years PS4/PS5 will be collected like NES, NeoGeo... is collected today)

And conveniently all these things don't make any money for the game publishers/console companies...

The Wii came out in 2006 and all my discs still work fine. But me thinks this missing the main point people are mad. People are fine with digital only for the most part, but they don't trust Sony to do the right thing. For instance, I wonder if all the games I bought for the PS Vita and PS3 will be available in 5-10 years. With physical media I at least have the option of going to a retro game store and buying a copy.

Incidentally, I've recently started collecting DVD and Blu Ray. I've found unopened copies of some of my favorite movies at thrift stores for a few dollars. It is nice to know I can watch a movie without figuring out which streaming service it is currently on or having to connect to the internet. Plus, if I had friends, I could loan them a copy.

As far as I know, Bluray discs are fairly decent in comparison to something like a DVD. In any case, I imagine the disc will live for longer than what Sony will keep their store up.

> or is it too much to understand for them?

You’re talking about a guy in Cleveland like he’s a Neanderthal.

oddly specific

The disc drive and console will fail long before the discs unless you use them as coasters.

btw what happened to coasters? 90's and 2000's those things were on every surface you would reasonably expect to set a drink down. Now I never see them!

I can still play my Gamecube games, and my original copy of Final Fantasy 7 is still alive and kicking. Thirty, twenty year old games still running perfectly well. I can also give them to friends so they can try games out.

I can't exactly say I'd trust Sony to not fuck me over in thirty years of letting them handle my "license".

Free and open source software and licenses are the key. Digital vs Physical is irrelevant.

Better question is does average person have a disk drive to use a disk?

Maybe not, but this likely wasn’t a decision they made, but one made for them by PC, console, and car makers.

I will say, I still have a CD player in my car (2023 model year), an external optical drive for my computer), and will be getting an optical drive for my PS5 Pro. I was upset the “Pro” version didn’t come with one, that was foreshadowing by Sony.

Counterpoint. I remember when disc drives were requirement and shopping for a PC meant geeking out on disc drive read/write specs. I was then thankful when it disappeared and never missed it. I once thought about getting one as a peripheral device and it was $30 on Amazon, easily attainable. Yet, I guess that need wasn’t sufficient because I still never bought it. I know I could have one delivered to my doorstep tomorrow if I ever needed one though.

> I know I could have one delivered to my doorstep tomorrow if I ever needed one though.

One of the reasons I decided to get one a couple years ago was to do it while there were still decent options. I ended up with an LG. I imagine that at some point we’ll only see cat-on-keyboard brand players being resold from AliExpress.

I find with these decisions, it’s still hard to future proof. The USB standards and ports will evolve and that may be more of a problem. Probably plenty of ways to solve in the near future but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was more of a problem in longer term timeframe.

Why do they always love playing the willfully ignorant, gobbling on billionaire boots.

Does average peasant understand that lord deserves his rent on the games they play?

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