Gristle

I guess you could be right. I don’t know enough about chip repairs I just figured mechanical parts would be easier to find and replace than a cartridge.

1000% it does. But if your tires wear out you can buy new tires. If a chip wears out in your game boy color cartridge, are you going to replace it? Is there a shop you can bring your old PS2 disc to that can restore lost data?

Edit: I think a bike is a flawed analogy because you can repair a bike. You can’t repair an old physical game if it breaks. You can buy a replacement in both cases, until there are no longer bikes or no longer copies of old games still functioning and I’ve got a hunch that bikes are going to be around a lot longer than any physical media.

With a caveat - you need to share an ip address with the user at some point. A friend of mine logged into Steam on a pc in my house to get around that issue but my brother (who’s 1400 miles away) joined my family with no issues because we lived together at some point a decade ago.

Your physical media will degrade over time and you will eventually lose access to the game you bought physically. There’s no correct answer in this, unfortunately, and is fully your opinion. You can own and resell your physical media until it no longer functions and then where are you? You’re in the same boat as the person who bought digitally and lost access to their license. Even DRM free games from gog are only around until they stop hosting your download. If they stop hosting it and the hardware you own with your copy on it fails, you will again own nothing.

Thank you for writing these!