Being able to gift physical media to people.
Time was, books and video games and DVDs and CDs were perfect mid-budget presents. They weren't ridiculously expensive, extravagant purchases that made people feel awkward, but they also weren't a throwaway gift you could pick up while in line at the pharmacy. They were also purchases that required knowing the recipient's tastes, which made them feel somewhat intimate - picking an album that a friend had never heard but was just their style or getting someone that DVD of a movie you had watched together earlier in the year made the gift all the more meaningful. And when media was physical there was something... empowering, almost, about being able to grow a loved one's access to experiences they might not otherwise have had. Expanding their musical emotional palette or making their DVD library a little more robust in your shared genres of interest or letting them get as frustrated as you did on that first boss fight felt like ways of making connections.
But that's all kind of gone now. Most people just use streaming services for music or movies. The only people I know that still collect physical media are either die-hard cinephiles or those who are (rightly) suspicious of a licensing model for content who refuse to lose access to the media they love. Books feel like a weird gift in 2022 - why hand someone a giant tome of physical paper they'll need to either throw out or lug around for the rest of their lives when they could just as easily load it up on their Kindle? And while video games often have physical copies, the vast majority of indie titles are digital-only. Meanwhile, subscription options like Game Pass make it hard to know what people do or do not have access to, and the rise of the Epic Store (and its various free games) makes it hard to check if someone owns something just by glancing at their Steam library. Do you want to take the $60 gamble on a PS5 copy of Midnight Suns that assumes they didn't just buy it on the Epic Store instead?
There are exceptions, of course - coffee table books are more about the vibrant and glossy pages used to start conversations in person, or maybe you know someone who collects vinyl records and saw a rarity that would make the perfect gift. And maybe a signed printing of a book by your loved one's favorite author or a limited run physical copy of their favorite indie game would be a good get.
But broadly I think the death of physical media has made Christmas/birthday/etc shopping more difficult, because nothing has really been able to fill that "reasonably priced but still personalized" gift. These days mid-budget gift ideas are mostly junk: K-Mart exclusive Funko Pops or portable chargers that double hand warmers or t-shirts that cross Doctor Who with My Little Pony or whatever. And maybe you can find your loved ones in that morass of cheap plastic crap, but I find it just exhausting flitting through the same list of Amazon best-sellers they had last year (and the year before that, and the year before that). I'll never turn down an Amazon Gift Card or an additional 1TB external hard drive or spare JoyCons or whatever, but it's just not the same. There's no instinctual knowledge of taste, just recognition of interests, which isn't the same thing.
I dunno - it just feels like in an already lonely age it's one less way to see others or be seen, and that's kind of sad to me.
