Do you think our physical discs will become no more than cup coasters? Or will there be a way to one-time redeem our discs for a digital license of the game. This is, of course, assuming future consoles will be backwards-compatible, which seems to be the trend.
Companies don't even always transfer the digital licensees you have now forward, see like Nintendo and having to rebuy roms you owned on the wii on the 3DS. Bought it on both platforms and now want to play it on switch, LMAO fuck off and subscribe to our online service. Or Sony and the PlayStation classic games, bought it on the psp/ps3? Too bad buy the new version, sub to our service, or go to hell. No way will they ever help you out with physical licenses when they don't even help with digital ones lol, your shit outa luck there.
Not that it matters, yeah EVENETUALLY your disc will be worthless, but if it's taken care of well i could easily see most videogames out living our lifetimes, only disc rot that i've seen was from idiots who use their games as coasters for their drinks. Treat 'em nice and they'll likely out live you.
Plus it's so easy to mod most hardware now to play digital back ups on the real hardware it doesn't matter anyways when your games may eventually go out, you'll easily be able to continue playing them on most classic hardware with simple software mods, or easy diy mod chips. Plus emulation keeps getting closer and closer to machine accurate as well. I really think physical doom posters are just coping with the fact that they're getting scammed hard with their digital purchases.
I mean if the game has a good physical release then it should work just fine even if the entire console servers burn down or the internet exploded, you would still be able to install & play them offline.
If they do enable some way to redeem the disc for a digital license i wonder if that would somehow fuck up its usability as a traditional disc in different consoles other than yours. Isnt that what Xbox wanted to do with the Xbox One? It would SUCK if that happened.
I think in this hypothetical it's closer to how Sony did the "umd passport" in Japan. Still lame we don't get the dvd/bluray treatment where you get a physical and digital copy with a single purchase. The only time I've ever seen it happen in gaming was with a collector's edition or two, should honestly be standard feature, but maybe in the future when physical copies are 100% only for collectors it'll become the standard.