In the last essay (on the death of a gacha game) I said I'd come back to the discussion of media preservation. This is then an extension of the ideas discussed in various previous essays, but especially the previous two essays titled "Physical is King." I partially wanted to return to this topic because it is fresh on my mind due to the closure of Shadowverse, which is I think the first game I was ever invested in that was outright killed by its publisher. Second, because I've been seeing the idea that physical is king for games come up quite a lot online. Right now, this is largely due to the fact that Rockstar is weighing not having any physical version for GTA 6 at all, and with the special "physical" versions likely just being download codes. Now this sort of thing is hardly new in either front. There are hundreds of games that have never been distriibuted in any physical format (at least not officially.) And there have been plenty of "physical" games that are just codes; even the collector's edition of Fallout '76 was like that (it's hard to believe that that's 8 years behind us at this point.) But I think it's the combination of both things in a high profile game (especially with the likely price hike) that is upsetting more and more gamers. This has led to many people to take the stance "no phyiscal version, no buy" and with many others saying "no, that position is idiotic."
Now I should note that despite writing two (now three) essays with the title of "Physical is King" I did give caveats to this statement in both previous essays. In the first essay I noted that you could buy a physical disc copy of Overwatch 1, but it was meaningless since Battle.net would just override it with Overwatch 2. I also explicitly called out the "physical" version of Fallout '76, and even noted that the phyiscal version of the Orange Box (which does contain actual discs with game files on them) would be hard to use without Steam. I also noted that I have "non-physical" games that I have effective ownership over, namely several games that I've purchased from GOG and transferred from computer to computer rather than needing to redownlad them from GOG's servers again and again. In the second essay I expanded on my philsophy, but basically reiterated the same ideas. And I suppose that I should reiterate them again: it is possible to have bad physical versions and good digital versions. If your physical version can be shut down remotely, it's no better than a game you download and need a server check for. If your digital version can be freely copied, then it's for all practical purposes as good as physical. Hell, I've burned digital purposes onto CDs and the like in which case I actually have a physical version of it, and putting these files onto flash drives or external SSDs is practically having a physical version.
Something that I didn't mention much is that DRM free is preferable, if you can get it, in all fields. For example, a Blu Ray disc is physical, and it can't be disabled remotely. So in my bank it's "good." Same thing with an SNES cartridge. But in both cases it is very difficult to read the data I need to enjoy my media without properiety hardware (especially in the case of SNES cartridges.) Thus as long as I have an Super Nintendo system, I can play my SNES games no problem, even if Nintendo loses a license or wants to alter content in one of my games. If I lose the Super Nintendo, then I am screwed, but this is due to bad luck or due to hardware naturally failing, not due to the publisher getting in my way. Of course, if I legally had the actual files and an emulator to use them on, where I could duplicate both, that would be even better for the sake of preservation. Now I've said elsewhere that I am not endorsing piracy on this site, and that still holds here. So I do just get Blu Ray discs and watch them in a player, rather than trying to harvest the data for my own files, for example. But on the other hand I have purchased a few movies and a lot of music and games in purely DRM format. These I do copy as I will, legally for my own use, and the fact that there are no barriers in my way does make things better. So perhaps we should really say something like "never get things that can be taken away from you on a whim, and look for things that you can copy for the purposes of preservation." But that is far less pithy than "physical is king" and in many areas physical really does do what you need. A physical book or a CD both cannot be taken away from you (short of literal robbery of the physical item) and both are very convenient for every day use, with various ways to copy them if necessary (though this is less convenient for books.) On the other hand, a "digital copy" of a movie is very much something that you cannot rely on as many Playstation Network customers are finding out due to Sony removing hundreds of movies. That is, they are not only removing access but are deleting them from users accounts entirely so that even if they do come back users will not regain them. And these are things people paid for outright, they aren't "rented" or subscription services. (I'm not going to repost the Reisen and Tewi image from the last Physical is King essay, but I'm certainly thinking about it.) So on average if you tried to get everything in a physical form you'd end up better than someone who got everything in a digital form, even if the optimum strategy is to use a mixture of both as appropriate.
However, I want to focus on something else here, especially since I basically made all the above points in the previous essays. I want to focus on this: the world where physical was the expectation was better. Take the death of a computer game, which is now common and where many young gamers accept the rationkale of "well they couldn't support it forever." Contrast this with a company killing a game in 1995. Like if id Software wanted to promote the release of Quake by "retiring" Doom, which meant physically breaking into their customers' homes and destroying their copy of the Doom II discs. Such a thing would be unthinkable, and if you are raised in that environment you will be much less likely to accept the excuse of "we needed to remove the game from your account since we couldn't 'support' it anymore."
But more than that, physical releases can come with more than just the basic item. We can see this with computer games in terms of what else came in the box. I touched on this in this essay where I talked about help features. The focus there was on online help (i.e. help as you are using the software) but we also used to have extensive manuals, quick reference cards, etc. This wasn't "collector's edition" stuff (though those usually don't include manuals or reference cards now anyway). It came in every version. Releases often had more "extras." For exmaple, a story rich game like an RPG might have a short novella about the characters. Maps were common, even if they weren't necessary to be used in game. I remember some releases with character cards (image on front, descrition on back.) Obviously not every game did this extensively, but certainly thorugh the 90's it was normal to have at least a manual, and usually at least one more "extra." Then in the last 00's and especially in the 10's boxes started including less and less, with everything but the manual disappearing, then the manual being just a "quick start manual," then even that going away. We lost the culture of physicality before we lost the actual physical releases.
This is perhaps more striking in the realm of DVDs. If you go back through older DVDs, say 2005-2010 or so, you will often find tons of special features. Not always, there were always some cheapo releases, but your average DVD will include a commentary, some sort of behind the scenes featurette, and possibly some text and image pages to scroll through with more information. I want to stress that this sort of thing was near universal. People think of "behind the scenes features" and think of stuff like the Lord of the Rings extended edition boxed sets, which indeed had an insane amount of bonus footage. However, even the original "non-extended" release had a whole special features disc that included two TV specials, a music video for "May It Be", and more. The only classic discs that I own that lack features entirely, aside from fly by night company budget releases, are some anime series where the relevant behind the scenes footage would be in Japanese and hard to get. However, even with those you can still see a difference in that the DVD menus themselves used to be animated and cleverly put together, rather than the still silent screen we get in many modern disc releases.
I've purchased some more recent disks that look like 2002 era releases; where you just get a static start screen with the options "PLAY MOVIE", "SUBTITLES" and "CHAPTER SELECT." A couple work like really old DVDs where they don't even have menus; they just start playing the movie when you pop in the disc and you have to mess with the subtitles and audio options using the buttons on the remote. Of course there are still solid releases. The Discotek Project A-Ko releases in particular have an insane amount of stuff, including things like showing the box art for every home release (including the Discotek release), the "please flip disc over" animation for the Laserdisc release, an alternate ending that appeared on the Central Park Media release where they put in the wrong footage over the credits, etc. But this sort of thing is far from the norm.
The reality is that discs are seen by publishers as a side hustle, with the main thing being the streaming release. People watching digitally, espcially on a subscription service, just want to watch that video so they can move onto the next one. They aren't in the mode of getting a product based on that movie, where they might want extra features, they just want the video. So they just make the video and slap it on a disc for the disc release. Here you have the physical version, and in the sense of ownership it's far better to get that than to get a digital version. But the product is still often worse than what we got when buying (or at least renting) physical media was the norm. There is a sort of "culture of phyiscality" that accompanies physical releases where things as a whole really were better. I think a lot of people who just say "physical is king" without the caveats I put above are more after this lost culture than they are after the physical releases themselves.
What I mean by a "culture of physicality" is that when you bought something, you were buying an actual product, and care (hopefully) went into the whole product. Let's take a very simple example: suppose that there is an image that you like. If you buy it digitally, you will likely get the image file by itself. That's not bad, but that's all you get. If you buy a print, thought must be put into the material used for the print, whether to frame it and if so what sort of frame should be used, etc. If it comes in a box, there may even be thought to how the packaging is designed.
For another example, consider an album release. In a digital world, the artist might just release the tracks. If they are aiming for being listed to primarly on streaming serrvices like Spotify, they might not even craft a structure to the whole album. By that I mean they might not even think about what order the songs should appear on the album, with perhaps one song being intentionally structured to lead into another, since the users are just going to listen to songs at random anyway. If you are making a CD physical release you must at minimum determine an order, but you also need to design the printing on the top of the disc, the jewel case, the lyrics book and potentially a slip cover or other goodies. Now of course not everyone does put a lot of thought into this; there have been plenty of CDs with nothing but text on a white background for their cover and on the disc. But you have to make a conscious decision of how you are going to do these things. You can do something similar in the digital space; for example the Protomen commissioned "single art" for each track on their Act III release and in general encouraged their audience to think of the album of one cohesive thing. So again, just like with ownership, it's not quite so simple as "physical always good, digital always bad." However, the very nature of a physical object makes it more natural to include such goodies, while the very nature of a digital object makes it more natural to exclude them. This is what I mean by people really wanting the culture of physicality, not necessarily the physical releases themselves.
In fact, I think that the forgotten utility programs I discussed in a previous essay are a good example of the "culture of physicality" existing in a purely digital space. You might call the opposite the "culture of atomization." That is, you can get a digital copy of a song but that's all you get. Nothing else from the artist, no art on the case, not even links to other songs. You can in theory find all of this stuff individually if you know it is there, but each is handled as a separate atomic unit. With a physical object it is impossible to just get a song or a movie, etc; at minimum you need the medium that contains it which is probably going to be decorated, because why not? Nothing is an atomic unit. So for example in that essay I show a AD&D program that groups together many features. You have digital copies of many books, a dice roller program, programs to keep track of character information, several map making programs, automated random tables, etc. Each of these things could be done individually, and indeed it used to be easy to find fansites where people would make things like dice roller programs or character creators. (I don't think that there was ever an official Palladium character creator program, but I know I stumble across dozens of fan made ones.) However, there is something to be gained in having this all in one place. Similarly, the old Star Trek virtual encyclopedias not only include text articles, but they also have video clips and other multimedia, and everything is tied together with a very Star Trek-y interface. You can in theory find all the information in the text on various wikis, and can probably track down most video clips on places like Youtube (or maybe by streaming various episodes), but you lose the sense of unity when you have to find each thing individually. This is a place where the parts are certainly much less than the whole.
Basically I just want to talk about two things here: First, that "physical" isn't enough in and of itself, especially when we are talking about video games. Second, that we lost quite a bit with the disc to streaming transition, particular when it comes to special features.