A site for making physical releases out of digital games

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A site for making physical releases out of digital games

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.

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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.





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