I'm kind of tired of physical media being presented as a more ideal alternative to digital distribution or live service, because it completely misses the root of the problem. The problem is NOT digital vs. physical, it's the lack of rights you have to use the product and the practices associated with that. The fact that the game, movie, book, or whatever is being distributed digitally would not be an issue if your right to use it wasn't so restricted.
Take for example a service like Itch or GOG that offers "DRM free" downloads for games you've purchased. I would argue that setup is better than physical copies in just about every respect. Not only can you download the game you've purchased and back it up however you want, the service essentially provides you with an "offsite backup" of what you've purchased that requires no effort on your part. On top of that, making more backups of said games takes even less effort than if you had to rip a physical disk.
It bothers me that folks keep presenting physical media as an ideal for preservation, when the physical media being implied (usually optical disks) were never a good way to preserve those works to begin with. I feel like this shows an unfortunate tendency to approach the problem via nostalgia rather than via an understanding of what the problem actually is.
like, the lifespan of factory-pressed optical discs if and only if continually stored under professional archival conditions is supposed to be 50+ years?
(and there have been instances where not-immediately-obvious substandard materials got into the disc manufacture supply chain and professionally stored discs disintegrated in under 20, I believe)
"what if physical copy" is a (somewhat wishful thinking) dodge around prevailing market conditions and corporate practises; it isn't actually a strategy for indefinite preservation!
