It’s sensible for businesses to shift from physical media sales. Per CNBC’s calculations, DVD sales fell over 86 percent between 2008 and 2019. Research from the Motion Picture Association in 2021 found that physical media represented 8 percent of the home/mobile entertainment market in the US, falling behind digital (80 percent) and theatrical (12 percent).
But as physical media gets less lucrative and the shuttering of businesses makes optical discs harder to find, the streaming services that largely replaced them are getting aggravating and unreliable. And with the streaming industry becoming more competitive and profit-hungry than ever, you never know if the movie/show that most attracted you to a streaming service will still be available when you finally get a chance to sit down and watch. Even paid-for online libraries that were marketed as available “forever” have been ripped away from customers.
When someone buys or rents a DVD, they know exactly what content they’re paying for and for how long they’ll have it (assuming they take care of the physical media). They can also watch the content if the Internet goes out and be certain that they’re getting uncompressed 4K resolution. DVD viewers are also less likely to be bombarded with ads whenever they pause and can get around an ad-riddled smart TV home screen (nothing’s perfect; some DVDs have unskippable commercials).
If you throw away perfectly fine physical copies, you are just contributing to the ever-increasing plastic waste poisoning our ecosystems, and if you sell them then your digital copies are now illegal. Just put them in a disc binder and stick 'em in a closet for fuck sake!
I don’t get the point of having them then. No one will check, they’re just filling space…
If you’re going to sell the disks, just pirate instead, it’s the same in a legal sense (you have something you don’t have a legal claim to).
If you’re worried about space, get a disk binder or something. Disks aren’t that big, cases are, so ditch the case and keep the disk. I keep the disks too, but I have a ton of storage space.
I mean, that’s just what I do. With some of my games, I have bought them on Steam (because I did want the devs to get paid) and have a pirated version for the sake of ownership, which imo is fair. If I was insistent on paying, I would rather buy a digital copy and download a DRMless one, if there is no DRMless purchase outright.
so are you. they’re all going to end up in a landfill one way or another.
you mean throw the plastic case away?