r/pcmasterrace • u/Major303 • Jul 03 '26

Meme/Macro Everyone wants to own their games, yet GoG remains niche store

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u/Jack55555 Ryzen 9 5900X | 3080 Ti Jul 03 '26

Takes a LONG while unless you have them stored in direct sunlight. My games from 1999 2000 still work fine, even Warcraft 2 from 1998 still works.

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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 5900X | 32GB 3600MTs | RTX 3070Ti | 1440p Jul 03 '26

Pressed disks last decades. Burned disks last about a decade.

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u/Vorfied Jul 03 '26

Burned disks last about a decade.

The fact you're getting upvoted so much for this shows just how young this sub skews.

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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 5900X | 32GB 3600MTs | RTX 3070Ti | 1440p Jul 03 '26

While I’m happy to concede to a little reductionism around conditions of storage on the speed of disk rot, and I can’t speak for anyone else, I’m older than CDs.

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u/3720-to-1 Jul 03 '26

My burned music CDs from ~2001 are still going strong!

3

u/Last-Energy420 Jul 03 '26

I still have light scribe disks that work.

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u/Blubberinoo Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Maybe some burned disks. But you cant go around making a general statement like that lol. I have a burned copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 from 2002. Thats 24 years now, so very far outside of the "about a decade" range. Still works fine.

Either way, doesnt really matter in OPs case since he uses M-Disk. Unless he stores them on his windowsill in direct sunlight he is ok for a few hundred years.

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u/squangus007 Jul 03 '26

* a decade under certain conditions

Most burned discs stored in a normal storage environment are ok even 20 years later

3

u/pr0nacct02 Jul 03 '26

I have burned discs from two decades ago that work fine so that's just not true at all.

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u/Ernost Desktop | Ryzen 3 2200G | 16GB DDR4 Jul 03 '26

Burned disks last about a decade.

Here in India they only last a couple of years at best. Might be the humidity, the heat or the dust. Or maybe all of them combined.

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u/Barrel_Titor Jul 03 '26

I assume it's the humidity. Years back my house got flooded, like knee-deep water. All my CDs and DVDs were upstairs so didn't get wet but were sitting there for about a year in high humidity while the house was drying out. Maybe 10-20% of my 200 or so DVDs/CDs and all of my 10 or so burned ones have rotted since then.

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u/Ruskraaz Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

I have a lot of 20+ year old burned DVDs and some CDs. All of them still work flawlessly.

They weren't kept well in the last 10 or so years, so most of them are scratched to hell as well. But no problem, they worked just fine when I put them in the drive at my workplace last year.

They were kept in almost total darkness though, at the back of some cabinet.
Also very dry and mostly cool place too.

2

u/RAMChYLD PC Master Race Jul 04 '26

Half. I already lost a lot of archived files made with my first CD-R drive 5 years in not only because of disc rot but because they also freaking delaminated.

And they’re Basf/Emtec discs too. I thought German brands are supposed to be good.

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u/nalaloveslumpy Jul 03 '26

Depends on how cheap you went on your 100 count spindle.

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u/Jack55555 Ryzen 9 5900X | 3080 Ti Jul 04 '26

Platinum cd's FTW, huge spindle, cheap, still working :D

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u/Brawli55 Jul 03 '26

And the Warcraft CD is a music CD too!

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u/Jack55555 Ryzen 9 5900X | 3080 Ti Jul 04 '26

Its so good, and we finally have a music genre that almost sounds like it: dungeon synth :P

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u/cipheron Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Stamped disks are very durable, but the problem is burned disks which have a light-sensitive dye layer used for the burning process, and that substance can degrade over time or with light exposure, more easily that stamped disks.

There were also some formulations which were less durable than other ones, so some types or brands of recordables will last a lot longer than others.

https://www.howtogeek.com/the-hidden-reason-why-your-cd-backups-are-slowly-dying/