Most important features of physical media are transferability (you can give the game to someone else and it will run) and autonomous access (you can run your game even if Sony or simply your Internet connection go down). Piracy typically checks both of these boxes.
It may not hold a collector’s value if that’s what you’re after, but I’d argue this is secondary anyway. And if you simply want to hold a bunch of game disks, you can always buy an empty disk and put the game in there.
Just FYI because seemingly no one appears to know this, but if your console is set as your “home console”, you can play all of your digital games offline, forever, on it. You can back them up to external drives, and copy them back over to the console at any time and play them, even in a nuclear submarine under the ocean.
The “home console” thing make it store all of your licenses locally, so there is no need to connect to auth servers ever on that console to play the existing games. I used to have every single game I own on Xbox backed up on external drives, but couldn’t be bothered after a while as I have no issues with internet.
If I lost internet for a bit and couldn’t play a specific game because I didn’t have it downloaded, I’d just play something else until I have internet again. That’s not something I lose sleep over.
Most important features of physical media are transferability (you can give the game to someone else and it will run) and autonomous access (you can run your game even if Sony or simply your Internet connection go down). Piracy typically checks both of these boxes.
It may not hold a collector’s value if that’s what you’re after, but I’d argue this is secondary anyway. And if you simply want to hold a bunch of game disks, you can always buy an empty disk and put the game in there.
Just FYI because seemingly no one appears to know this, but if your console is set as your “home console”, you can play all of your digital games offline, forever, on it. You can back them up to external drives, and copy them back over to the console at any time and play them, even in a nuclear submarine under the ocean.
The “home console” thing make it store all of your licenses locally, so there is no need to connect to auth servers ever on that console to play the existing games. I used to have every single game I own on Xbox backed up on external drives, but couldn’t be bothered after a while as I have no issues with internet.
If I lost internet for a bit and couldn’t play a specific game because I didn’t have it downloaded, I’d just play something else until I have internet again. That’s not something I lose sleep over.
The more I know!
A bit more info:
Xbox: https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/console/my-home-xbox
PlayStation: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/account/ps5-console-sharing-offline-play/