Rating physical media by how much of a scam it is
Physical media is often flaunted as “media preservation” or as the hallmark of a “real fan”, however I’m here to show you that this is buzzword capitalist propaganda. A real fan seeds a torrent.
Games
Games are by far the easiest one to demonstrate as worthless. There are no objective benefits to physical games. DRM is present and well on physical, preservation? You’re not supposed to be able to dump that switch cartridge. But it’ll be available long after stores are offline? True and so will piracy. Any desire you have to buy physical games was something drilled into you that “real fans” pay money. Real fans participate in capitalism and buy physical media. You’re not a fake fan are you?
Music
Next is music. For the most part there is no objective benefit to physical music. Vinyl sounds “different”, but if you’re into vinyl you are deep into a rabbithole of scams . CDs obviously aren’t different. FLAC is a lossless format that loses no data, which is what should be present on CDs. This allows for artificial benefits to physical media where theoretically your only two options are a shitty mp3 or a lossless CD. I’m honestly not sure how common it is for the only two options being lame streaming or high quality CD music but if that’s the only option, you’ve got artifical scarcity. Bitrate is what saves music CDs from being a total 100% scam.
Video
Blu-ray is like music. In theory there is no benefit to the format. In practice? Bitrate yet again saves blu-ray from being a total waste, It’s even worse for blu-ray because nobody sells video files directly anymore, and even when you can pirate it is extremely common for your only option to be reencoded versions that sure are much less in size, but have less bitrate. Due to the sheer size difference between a direct rip and a reencoded one, good luck finding any direct rips. I’m sure you can hop on the hassle that is private trackers, but that is a far different rabbit hole.
Books
And the winner of the physical media content is books. I quite like how the oldest out of these four is also one that is substantially different with a physical book compared to digital reading. There is no page flipping with my kindle.
tl;dr books not really, games yes, music 99% yes, bluray 50/50