this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
919 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
87649 readers
3525 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just to poke the hornets nest: if CDs and Blu-ray discs are a crappy medium, moving forward, what would you suggest to be the replacement?
I’m all for physical media, but current optical media is more than a generation past obsolete and needs to be replaced.
DRM-Free files that the user can archive on their own media, in their own format, as they wish.
The ability to distribute media without shipping physical goods allows for much smaller productions to have wide releases and in some cases to make their games cheaper than otherwise required (cough, switch tax). The issue is the DRM preventing the user from making their own backups, rather than the physical product (although steam does allow you to make backups and copies of your library folder which is cool).
The discs served as a proxy for licensing, right? It's easy to conflate owning the disc with owning the rights to play the game; but it's also easy to have DRM render discs useless if a game has "phone home" to unlock itself.
People don't necessarily want discs, they want to own a copy of the game. It's not a physical medium that really separates the two, it's licensing and DRM software.