Digital vs physical media which do you prefer?
Ruin Explorer
Legend
I'd like to prefer digital, because I have limited space, living in London, and I love movies, games, books, music, and so on. If everything I had media-wise was physical, my flat would hoarder-stuffed with it.
But every company that sells digital media has been proven untrustworthy and unreliable. They pull stuff entirely. They only have some low-quality-version of a work. They change stuff - more often by ineptitude than malice, which is even worse! They go bankrupt or get bought and stuff you "owned" gets taken away.
A particularly egregious example would be Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on Steam. When I bought it, and for most of a decade thereafter, it was fine - it was a perfectly good PC-specific PC port of GTA:SA. Then the absolute bloody unspeakable unspeakables at Rockstar games decided that because they could no longer sell this version of GTA:SA, they wouldn't just retire it from sale (allowing it to still be downloaded) and instead sell a different version (which is something legally they could do - they even admitted as much later - and that many companies have done), that they'd just overwrite the original for all owners. And they did that - without any permission or warning - just overwrote the well-functioning PC port which had all the music correct and looked right, with a terrible mobile port version of GTA:SA, which had lost about 30% of the music, including all the most iconic songs (including ones used in cutscenes, even). When the backlash caught up with them, they claimed they thought they were "adding value" by kindly providing this "updated" version. Absolute hogswash of course - they just didn't want there to be a perception that they were now selling people a "lesser" version of GTA:SA so dragged everyone down to that level.
To be fair, these are the utter morons who a few years later brought out the legendarily terrible GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition which looked like crap, with insane character redesigns and early use of AI-generated textures which looked incredibly bad, played like crap (despite "improvements"), and was missing practically all the most important music. It still sold extremely well because they just lied and lied up to the point of release, then after admitting it wasn't up to the standards people would expect, lied and said they'd fix it all - instead they sort of tinkered and removed the most obviously AI-generated textures, but left it looking unholy and still missing the music - as such even the degraded mobile port version of GTA:SA I have is better than the abomination in that. Hilariously they did initially suggest they'd "upgrade" owners of the existing versions to the horrific Definitive Edition automatically and without any choice, but backed off after how bad the release was - they'd probably have got sued if they didn't.
Even stuff like books cannot be trusted in digital, which is astounding, because of the low-rent OCR that was used to scan in a lot of books. A good example is my emotionally favourite book, Imajica, by Clive Barker. It's a hefty tome with a lot of unusual words, both made up and just obscure, and the OCR is absolutely terrible. At dozens of points through the book in Kindle you're pulled out of the text by mistakes in the OCR - worse, when the OCR craps out on a novel or weird word, it usually replaces it with a mundane one, and inconsistently - so that word will be used sometimes, and the magical word other times. Others make Barker look like he's a bad writer, when in fact Amazon are a lazy company with bad computers. It's very clear that they didn't, for example, get someone to proofread what they'd done. You can technically flag this stuff to be fixed, but will any of it be? I don't think so. This book had been on sale in digital for many years, perhaps even a decade or more before I got it on Kindle - and it still had these errors in it. I'm so glad I read it on physical first, but I'm also sad because anyone coming new to Imajica now is quite likely to read the digital version, and will be confused about why some bits of have bad grammar or randomly use the wrong word.
But every company that sells digital media has been proven untrustworthy and unreliable. They pull stuff entirely. They only have some low-quality-version of a work. They change stuff - more often by ineptitude than malice, which is even worse! They go bankrupt or get bought and stuff you "owned" gets taken away.
A particularly egregious example would be Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on Steam. When I bought it, and for most of a decade thereafter, it was fine - it was a perfectly good PC-specific PC port of GTA:SA. Then the absolute bloody unspeakable unspeakables at Rockstar games decided that because they could no longer sell this version of GTA:SA, they wouldn't just retire it from sale (allowing it to still be downloaded) and instead sell a different version (which is something legally they could do - they even admitted as much later - and that many companies have done), that they'd just overwrite the original for all owners. And they did that - without any permission or warning - just overwrote the well-functioning PC port which had all the music correct and looked right, with a terrible mobile port version of GTA:SA, which had lost about 30% of the music, including all the most iconic songs (including ones used in cutscenes, even). When the backlash caught up with them, they claimed they thought they were "adding value" by kindly providing this "updated" version. Absolute hogswash of course - they just didn't want there to be a perception that they were now selling people a "lesser" version of GTA:SA so dragged everyone down to that level.
To be fair, these are the utter morons who a few years later brought out the legendarily terrible GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition which looked like crap, with insane character redesigns and early use of AI-generated textures which looked incredibly bad, played like crap (despite "improvements"), and was missing practically all the most important music. It still sold extremely well because they just lied and lied up to the point of release, then after admitting it wasn't up to the standards people would expect, lied and said they'd fix it all - instead they sort of tinkered and removed the most obviously AI-generated textures, but left it looking unholy and still missing the music - as such even the degraded mobile port version of GTA:SA I have is better than the abomination in that. Hilariously they did initially suggest they'd "upgrade" owners of the existing versions to the horrific Definitive Edition automatically and without any choice, but backed off after how bad the release was - they'd probably have got sued if they didn't.
Even stuff like books cannot be trusted in digital, which is astounding, because of the low-rent OCR that was used to scan in a lot of books. A good example is my emotionally favourite book, Imajica, by Clive Barker. It's a hefty tome with a lot of unusual words, both made up and just obscure, and the OCR is absolutely terrible. At dozens of points through the book in Kindle you're pulled out of the text by mistakes in the OCR - worse, when the OCR craps out on a novel or weird word, it usually replaces it with a mundane one, and inconsistently - so that word will be used sometimes, and the magical word other times. Others make Barker look like he's a bad writer, when in fact Amazon are a lazy company with bad computers. It's very clear that they didn't, for example, get someone to proofread what they'd done. You can technically flag this stuff to be fixed, but will any of it be? I don't think so. This book had been on sale in digital for many years, perhaps even a decade or more before I got it on Kindle - and it still had these errors in it. I'm so glad I read it on physical first, but I'm also sad because anyone coming new to Imajica now is quite likely to read the digital version, and will be confused about why some bits of have bad grammar or randomly use the wrong word.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
Get back to me when entire studios become unavailable.
Clint_L
Hero
So the argument for physical media is that you have it when you want it? What if you never bought that movie? (Also, 28 days Later can be purchased digitally).
It's an illogical argument. Streaming gives you access to thousands upon thousands of movies on demand. Owning physical copies gives you access to a fraction of that. If it's a particular film that you want to make sure you always have, just buy a digital copy - I've got several.
If you prefer physical copies, cool. But trying to argue that they are somehow more convenient is bizarre. It's just trying to justify the psychological need to possess tangible objects.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Or, as I noted before, you just back things up offline. I mean, I'm 66, if I can figure this out, I'd think the people younger than I am can.
Thomas Shey
Legend
That's the only reason I still tend to buy the core book. It doesn't come close to countering the benefits of searchability for supplements, but it can be useful there if the core book has anything you might want to reference frequently.
trappedslider
Legend
Please tell me where I can find seasons 3-8 of the original Law and Order and you will be a hero to many people
So, what you you're saying is basically "The image/tweet is incorrect" no need to go start being pretentious about it lol
