Trump tariffs threaten the future of physical video games, analyst warns

Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.

There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.

Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.

"Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place."

Unfortunately, even physical game discs so often don't contain the full game files and requires access to servers in order to download and access the game. No longer is buying physical the answer to the game preservation problem.

I think the author missed the mark here by talking about game preservation, as many are already pointing out in these comments.

The real benefit of buying a physical disc/cartridge copy of a game nowadays is the ability to resell it when you're done playing. That's actually a huge boon if you buy a lot of newly released games at full price, and play on consoles where sales are less common than PC. Reselling games can save you a LOT of money over time.

Once again gamers are the true oppressed class.

Physical media has been dying for years. If you look at the sales statistics between physical and digital, it makes for grim reading if you care about physical media.

75% of game sales in Europe in 2024 were digital. In 2022, 90% of game sales in the UK were digital. It's a similar story pretty much everywhere. And whilst there's a lot of noise on the internet about how bad a digital-only future would be, the average consumer doesn't care.