The nerds are revolting. In July, Sony announced a total moratorium on disc production for its Playstation devices. The company will discontinue its physical games at the beginning of 2028, and since gamers can’t resell their digital purchases, the decision will destroy an existing second-hand market. Sony will be able to edit, and theoretically delete, any copy of any video game in its system.
“There are no benefits to this change,” said the gaming YouTuber penguinz0, in a video called “Everyone Should Hate This”. It has already surpassed a million views. “There is no one who should be excited about this. Because why would you as a consumer want to have a chance that what you bought disappears?”
Some game manufacturers have realised they can simply opt out of maintaining their online servers, “sunsetting” their products after a decade of consistent play. When Ubisoft discontinued player licences for its racing game The Crew after a decade of online server access, a group of fans formed the consumer rights organisation Stop Killing Games. “We think this practice is hostile to consumers,” they stated last year, in a petition to the UK government, “and entirely preventable.”
Many of the other big players in our culture industry engage in some element of “sunsetting.” Amazon offers consumers the chance to “buy” a digital copy of any film or TV series on its Prime Video platform. While a physical purchase should theoretically last forever, digital “buyers” only receive the product they’ve paid for until Amazon itself loses streaming rights. Last year, a woman filed a class-action lawsuit against the company in the United States after she couldn’t access a Nickelodeon series she’d bought months prior.
Some are taking their rebellion to a new extreme: breaking off from the whole digital ecosystem. When companies disincentivise customers from getting their hands on physical discs, owning a physical disc becomes an act of resistance. One London magazine editor in his mid-thirties began to accumulate DVDs – hundreds so far, including “a nice Three Colours box set” – when he noticed Amazon sneaking advert breaks into the films he thought he’d paid to watch ad-free. Matthew, a 32-year-old from Bristol, started collecting when Netflix removed Frasier from its catalogue. Jerry, a 22-year-old from Canada, has been amassing physical music releases since 2018, when she became interested in highly collectible K-pop albums. In 2023, after growing disillusioned with the cutthroat vinyl market and learning about “streaming services reconfiguring the creative economy”, she began to focus on curating a “personal archive” of CDs. “I’d personally witnessed albums I’ve saved on Apple Music being taken down,” she says, “[and] songs that had to change or get taken down due to uncleared samples.”
In the past year, the phrase “physical media” has become a memetic taste signifier, spawning thousands of hours of YouTube content. A lot of it fits perfectly into the tried-and-tested patterns of the influencer internet, which allow viewers to engage in consumption-by-proxy: YouTubers unpack “hauls” of CDs and DVDs, showcase their collections, and vlog their way through shopping trips. For some of these influencers, collecting a lot of physical discs at once can only be for the greater good; the analogue turn means we can engage in a kind of almost-activism, absolving ourselves of involvement in the Big Tech monopoly while giving ourselves an excuse to buy the things we probably wanted anyway.
Some collectors think they’re saving the rest of us in case of a future cultural blackout. If companies think it’s profitable to leave games unplayed and films in “distributor limbo”, we might not be able to trust them as stewards of culture. The majority of films from Hollywood’s silent era are already lost because of corporate neglect, plenty of surviving productions have never had a DVD release and hundreds of modern stories about “lost media” float through the post-pandemic internet, forming a particularly potent system of urban mythology. “Games are art, and have grown into a huge influence for our society,” argues the Stop Killing Games website. “Deliberately rendering [games] unplayable is the destruction of cultural heritage.”
Perhaps these collections have taken off because they indulge an idea of the self we were all leaning towards anyway. Recent online anxieties tell us not to be “performative.” It’s weird, we’re told, to try too hard to exhibit our tastes for outside approval. But an age of surface-level online interaction means there are few alternative ways to reach potential partners and friends. “Analogue” influencers understand the impulse, and explicitly encourage us to manifest the self by buying into certain cultural products. “It’s Time You Start Building Your Own Physical Media Library”, one YouTuber counsels us, before telling us to “build a catalogue that represents you”.
Another uses a ten-minute video essay on the merits of physical media as a pretext to showcase his own collection, which features a DVD of Wong Kar-wai’s uber-trendy Chungking Express, a pile of vintage vinyls, several signed CDs and a Sony Walkman. Some businesses have latched onto the trend: boutique film distributor Criterion has made a cult hit out of its Criterion Closet YouTube series, which asks actors and directors to talk their way through films of personal interest. The videos often become cultural flashpoints; they feel so high-minded, and so sincere, that it’s difficult to remember they are really ads for expensive DVDs.
Sometimes these curatorial impulses are useful. “A physical media collection is a fashion and taste statement,” says music blogger Wane Lietoc, who lives in America and has spent eight years collecting more than 3,000 cassettes. Some were originally sold by enthusiasts who looked to get rid of their own stashes, listing tens or hundreds of tapes in single eBay listings. Lietoc has learned a lot from buying and perusing these mass lots, which work like potted cultural histories. “Few people were great curators,” they say, “but you feel a pulse of what music and culture mattered and looms as a spectre over us.”
Tom, 25, is from Manchester and collected DVDs and Blu-Rays for five years before turning to piracy instead. “Over time I realised my primary pleasure was just looking at [my collection], and seeing it expand…” he says. “It’s so much plastic slowly rotting away on a shelf, almost never actually being watched.” Since torrents can be transferred from one private computer to another, he says his hard drive has “probably spawned… hundreds of digital copies of weird shitty horror films… I genuinely feel [it’s] a more useful mode of preservation.”
There’s a caveat, which is that few of these torrented files would exist in the first place without collectors. The low-budget horror productions he likes often end up in what he calls “ownership purgatory”, with no party able to secure distribution rights. “Relying on legitimate streaming services,” says Tom, “would mean missing out on masses of films.” The once-obscure 1981 horror film Possession has recently taken off among online arthouse enthusiasts. There have been endless repertory screenings, and endless references in certain online circles. A remake is currently in the works at Paramount. But the original film was inaccessible until 2014, when minor distributor Mondo Vision released a restored Blu-Ray in the United States.
“[These labels] need to exist and be profitable enough to obtain rights,” he says. “And the present model is that they’re sustained by nerds buying £150 luxury Blu-Ray sets in velour boxes.”
Some names have been changed
[Further reading: The ubiquity of object lessons]
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