By Nelson Schneider - 10/15/17 at 05:01 PM CT

I bring you dismal news, MeltedJoystick readers. Sadly, the physical distribution of videogames has reached the end of its usefulness. As much as it pains me – as a staunch proponent of physical media and perpetual software ownership – I have to admit that physical media in videogames is no longer what it once was. Cartridges and discs have remained largely the same in structure, but the ways in which they are currently used largely negate their original purpose. What happened to bring us to this point? Read on to find out.

5. Games Require Installs, No Longer Run Off the Install Media.
Thanks to Microsoft and the OG Xbox, the concept of games requiring hard disk installs was shoveled from the PC side of gaming to the console side of gaming in the 6th Gen. While the OG Xbox never got a whole lot of respect from gamers outside the ghetto, other console makers took note of its ability to snag PC game ports… thus every Sony and MS console since has followed the same paradigm. In these situations, the optical media doesn’t even contain playable code, but compressed installer packages, and only needs to be in the console’s disc drive to act as an authentication key. Even worse, the installation process isn’t quick and easy, often taking a half-hour or more and requiring gamers to schedule their activities around it.

4. Games Require Gigabytes of Patches at Launch.
Having a collection of archived installers on optical media still wouldn’t be abjectly terrible… provided these optical discs contained the definitive versions of the games. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for over a decade. After popping a disc into a console and waiting for it to install, you’d think your game would be ready to play… but you’d be WRONG. Nearly every game these days, even from conservative Japanese developers like Nintendo, requires massive day-one updates/patches. These updates fix glitches and add content that, for whatever reason, didn’t make it into the gold disc image that was sent to the manufacturing press. Prior to getting good Internet, these things were a deal breaker for me, as I couldn’t/wouldn’t leave my console running and downloading for days at a time. Now that my online connection has joined the 21st Century, I’m not as bothered by updates… but there’s no denying that their presence completely devalues physical media that doesn’t contain them.

3. Season Passes Sold Separately.
Season Passes are just the modern take on the old PC gaming phenomenon known as the “Expansion Pack.” There’s nothing wrong with these… except for the fact that they are now entirely digital. I can’t think of a single current-gen game that provides its DLC on a disc, whereas even last Gen, “The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion” and “Red Dead Redemption” did, to name some examples off the top of my head. If you’re buying physical media because you want to preserve and archive your games, keeping them accessible forever, the very presence of digital-only Season Passes completely negates your noble intentions.

2. Limited Runs of Indie Games are Against Everything Indie Stands For.
I love Indie games. They’re cheap, they’re creative, they aren’t bogged-down by all the nonsense that clings to the “AAA” Games Industry like so many malignant colon polyps. The lack of publishers is a large contributing factor to Indie game development’s freedom… but no publisher generally means no physical distribution. An outfit called Limited Run Games, however, on occasion will manufacture… err… limited runs of exceptionally popular digital-only games, complete with fancy box art. Then you’ve also got Nintendo encouraging physical releases of Indie games on the Switch. Yet these physical editions are inherently limited in availability and also boosted in price, since whichever company was brought on board to create the physical product will need money to do so, plus more money to make a profit off the activity. While Limited Run Games supposedly started out of a desire to preserve digital-only products, the very act of creating artificially tiny physical print runs is, hypocritically, even worse for preservation than a digital only format. Limited Run Games is doing nothing but creating an army of “Little Samsons.” The One True Path to perpetual game preservation is the DRM-free digital release, allowing archival copies to spread far and wide across The Cloud and settle in hard drives and DVD burners across the world. Unfortunately, until Sony and Nintendo lighten up a bit (read: a LOT), digital-only and Indie games will only receive the love and respect they deserve on open platforms, like PC.

1. Nintendo Dropped the Ball with the Switch.
When Nintendo Switched *snap* back to cartridges from optical media for their newest hardware, they had the unprecedented opportunity to flip the paradigm. They could have subverted all of the previous downsides in this list with their new cartridge format, the game card: The Switch could have run games straight off the game cards instead of installing them on the system’s tiny solid-state drive and/or SD expansion. The game card format could have been writable, allowing updates and Season Passes to be stored on the cartridge itself. Nintendo could have allowed shoppers to download digital purchases onto blank game cards, thus giving Indies a physical form without the associated limited runs and inflated costs. But Nintendo is a huge company, and Nintendo is an old company. After seeing how the original Wii, along with many of their other platforms, got hacked and homebrewed, the conservative Japanese dinosaur seems to be deathly afraid of exploring new technologies and new ways of doing things. Alas, the game card format is just being used as a small-footprint variant of the optical format, in all its uselessness.

Though things may look bleak for physical games, it’s really only bleak for physical games distribution, and specifically on locked-down platforms, like consoles. While next to no stores still stock physical PC games, PC is – ironically – the best platform for physical preservation of software, thanks to a combination of loosening DRM – with sites like GOG.com providing 100% DRM-free digital products – and the open nature of the underlying operating system, allowing software owners/licensers to create their own physical archives via any form of non-volatile storage or optical media. Hell, thanks to the long tradition of emulation and ROM dumping on – you guessed it – PC, it’s also the definitive platform for the preservation of console games. No, you won’t get your fancy box/disc art or instruction manual (unless you print your own), but if that’s the part of physical games media you love the most, you’re kind of missing the point.