When you buy digital media, whether physical or digital, you are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want. You do not own the media. You don’t own the rights to that game just because you have a physical copy of it, you don’t have access to the source code, and it is still riddled with DRM. The same applies to movies and music as well.
At the end of the day, whether a piece of media is stored on a Blu-ray/DVD or an HDD/SSD makes little difference. If all ownership means to you is being able to access the media you’ve purchased a license to consume regardless of its online status, then archive it. Your SSD or HDD is as much a physical media as a Blu-ray disk.
There’s a huge difference though with physical media. Yeah, you don’t own the movie, but you own the DVD that it’s stored on. They’re not going to come into your house and take the DVD back. Once you have it, it’s yours forever. When you “buy” something hosted on a corporate server, you can lose it if they don’t want to host it anymore, as evidenced by this Sony thing, or if they go out of business.
When you buy digital media, whether physical or digital, you are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want. You do not own the media. You don’t own the rights to that game just because you have a physical copy of it, you don’t have access to the source code, and it is still riddled with DRM. The same applies to movies and music as well.
At the end of the day, whether a piece of media is stored on a Blu-ray/DVD or an HDD/SSD makes little difference. If all ownership means to you is being able to access the media you’ve purchased a license to consume regardless of its online status, then archive it. Your SSD or HDD is as much a physical media as a Blu-ray disk.
There’s a huge difference though with physical media. Yeah, you don’t own the movie, but you own the DVD that it’s stored on. They’re not going to come into your house and take the DVD back. Once you have it, it’s yours forever. When you “buy” something hosted on a corporate server, you can lose it if they don’t want to host it anymore, as evidenced by this Sony thing, or if they go out of business.