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CliffyB's Cock Holster
I agree with you. The lesser of three evils is a hell of a hero to pick as your "good guy." On the other hand, as bad a solution as GCC are, at least they're tradable and convey some level of "ownership."
Ever since that one thread, I've been hoping that one good aspect of this AI disaster will be a Silicon Valley-style efficient form of compression and upscaling, allowing for larger games to be stored on smaller disks and carts… just in time for everyone to abandon physical media. -_-
At least they'll take up less hard drive space if it pans out.
The reality is that if you disregard "the sense of ownership" aspect and just look at discs in terms of their functionality as a storage/distribution mechanism, they actually suck.
They are relatively bulky, slow at data transfer, and being pressed media become out-dated in most cases immediately upon release.
Also, the denser they are the more prone they become to decay over time due to chemical reactions between the substrate layer particularly when exposed to sunlight. The truth of the matter is that despite how they were marketed as being more robust than magnetic media, their expected life-span of 10-20 years is actually less than that of magnetic tape which is generally expected to last 10-30 years. I personally have 40 year old floppy discs that still read perfectly!