Yea, so this doesn’t exist, but should it?
Think about:
- TheMovieDB style identifiers with box art
- Auto-generated and/or community created and upvoted DVD labels, case inserts, or USB/SSD stickers you can print yourself (no reason physical media has to be “round”)
- Automated scripts for generating local media savers/installers from GOG and Steam
This doesn’t seem like a very difficult thing to create for the niche community of people that want physical copies.
Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.
Even pressed discs can rot. Like many WB Blu-Rays were made with a faulty process and many will rot in the next few decades.
All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.
Not inorganic BDs.
Whatever u do, never expose dyes to sunlight.
Huh, that’s interesting. I already expressed my thoughts on consumers making their own physical media in another post (tl;dr: I don’t think it makes much sense), but if there are recordable discs with lifespans comparable with pressed discs, maybe a print-on-demand service could be a solution for developers that can’t afford to order a batch of a thousand discs and cases and rely on digital distribution because of that.
I consider’m backups. I make & test’m often. I’m even making multiple copies of the same “game” in one BD, to ensure when a BD needs to be reburned.