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Have you ever experienced disc rot?

Have you ever experienced disc rot?

  • Yes (1-3 games)

    Votes: 28 13.9%
  • Yes (4+)

    Votes: 10 5.0%
  • No

    Votes: 164 81.2%

  • Total voters
    202
Only on my Wii U games. It feels like the Wii U titles were poorly printed or something.
:messenger_sad_relieved: I will check my WiiU games

but speaking of WiiU I have a smash bross with a mark(like a popped bubble) that causes reading problems had to buy a used copy at the time
 
No. I got rid of all my physical games ages ago, but I still have a fair few CDs and DVDs and BluRays and so far they're all fine.

Our copy of Theme Hospital got a hole in the disc somehow back in the day, but that was my brother's fault :/
 
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"Although the so-called "disc rot" does exist, the reality is far less alarming than we might think. In fact, the industry's own estimates put the lifespan of a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray disc at several decades—and, under the right conditions, up to a century."
 
Only on burned discs back in the day. CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. A lot of those were cheap and weren't intended to last. Modern pressed discs were designed to last a lifetime. They should work 100+ years now as long as they are in the proper environment. Most disc rot examples are actual manufacturing defects, or discs kept in super humid conditions.

Disc rot is completely overblown. Your discs will outlive you as long as they are in a climate controlled environment.
 
Yes. All my sega CD and Turbo library are gone due to rot. Some of my PS One games are starting to go. DVDs for PS2 seem fine so far, but some of my DVDs from 2000 to 2002 are crap now. All Blu-ray discs are fine. I have lived in arid mountain zones, , the Caribbean for 4 years, extreme California desert for 7, now I'm on the humid East Coast.
 
Never. My old PS1 games are kept in a not so great environment back at my parent's home and still no issues with them (beyond scratches).
 
I forgot, ALL my PSP UMDs rotted. Games and movies. Cool concept, shitty format. Curiously, all my minidiscs are fine.
 
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My CD based PC games from the late 90s early 2000s.....ROT city!

RIP my Golden Tee collection

Never had a console game, cd, vcd or dvd rot
 
No, but I have experienced a lot of scratches in the PS1/2/3 eras.

PS4 is when I started buying digital largely because of this (and because I started to run out of shelfspace).
 
Original disks no, all my music CD and games with 30 year old still work. Just a couple games i burned myself stoped working, but DVD movies i burned more than 20 years ago also still work. Recently my internet went down for a couple days, and i did a movie marathon with some of these old movies i didnt watched for years.
 
I have a pretty large collection of movies on HD-DVD and Bluray.
When I wanted to RIP the HD-DVD Movies (the original hardware player is from 2008 or so and unbelievable slow for today standards) only 25% of the movies could still be read.
I heard that for example ALL Warner HD-DVDs have rotted, because they used certain chemicals which changed when being in contact with air.

There are also some bluray movies which have problems to be read.
There were also PS4 games I had problems with, despite having used them rarely. I think the killzone disc I got bundled with my PS4 back in the days stopped working.

So no, disc rot is not a phantasy, it is real.
 
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I've had a few audio CDs that were lost to disc rot, they all came from the same disc pressing plant. You could send in your CDs and then you would receive replacement copies. I also have (had) a DVD with a live show of the band Yes that had become unreadable. I may have many more but I won't know it unless I try to play each and every one of them and I'm not going to do that.

Oh, and a hundred or so recordable CDs filled with MP3s that had all become partially unreadable. I threw them all away, what's the point of MP3 CDs in the age of Spotify?
 
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Had a few. Mostly from burned dvd. Thats great and all that you are a collector and have a dedicated space and room co trolled temperature etc but not everyone has that commodity so to say that disc rot is a hoax is like saying sitting in a chair all day long without proper support, wont give you any back issues.

I lived in Dubai and Vietnam for years. Nobody has their AC turned on 24/7, especially when you are out or on vacation. Rooms become humid and a furnace.
 
Only ever on cheap blank / writeable discs. The only issues i've had have been second hand games with scratches.
From Cd music, dvd, mega cd to series x and most inbetween since the 90s - i've never had a problem with an official pressed disc.
Then again I am stickler for keeping them in the correct case, stored out of sunlight. Whether in a cupboard, garage or attic... keeping them in the case when not in use has a 100% record for me.
Even my attic stored 5.25" floppies still work 30 years later.
 
I have a pretty large collection of movies on HD-DVD and Bluray.
When I wanted to RIP the HD-DVD Movies (the original hardware player is from 2008 or so and unbelievable slow for today standards) only 25% of the movies could still be read.
I heard that for example ALL Warner HD-DVDs have rotted, because they used certain chemicals which changed when being in contact with air.

There are also some bluray movies which have problems to be read.
There were also PS4 games I had problems with, despite having used them rarely. I think the killzone disc I got bundled with my PS4 back in the days stopped working.

So no, disc rot is not a phantasy, it is real.
Pretty much all HD-DVDs are gone. There's a giant thread on AVS about it. Stealth DivX? One wonders.
 
I've never encountered disc rot. I've come across defective discs that caused games to stop working, or cases where they simply got damaged because children didn't treat these delicate things very carefully.
 
During this debacle from Sony, I have seen a lot of people bring up disc rot. I have thousands of disc from CD Rom disc back in the mid 90s to current. I have never personally experienced it, even in my own burned disc. I don't think it's happening that often as used games are selling these old disc and there's not articles coming out that these disc just don't work.

I was curious if people at GAF have had their disc rot over time. If so, what conditions were the disc in?
I've had a few. It sucks but blurays are not really that prone to it anyway. Older CDs are.
 
Yes, I have with CDs and DVDs only. So far, I've not encountered this issue with Blu-rays and 4K UHD discs but both of those are newer. I still buy music CDs but I do not buy DVDs anymore.

I own well over a thousand music CDs and have come across only 2 or 3 that have the telltale sticky residue of disc rot on them even though they're stored in a cool cupboard stacked in racks and well away from any sunlight, radiators or anything that could change the temperature radically.

As for DVDs, my original collection of The X-Files suffered from disc rot on several later season discs although I got rid of those years ago when I updated to the Blu-ray boxset, which so far seems to be fine (I watched season 1 again last year). I own several hundred movies on Blu-ray and 4K discs as well as 150+ PS4 and PS5 games on disc and none of the games have this issue (these are Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs anyway).

My own experience is that CDs and DVDs are more prone to disc rot than Blu-rays or 4K discs as the manufacturing process was older and I think they would have improved it now to the extent that these discs will last far, far longer than older ones. They only need to last your lifetime anyway as once your dead then who is going to care about them?
 
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On early CD-Rs and the odd laserdisc, yeah.
On a videogame, never.

It is rather convenient how the videogame disc rot narrative has been amplified online over the past few years.

I see websites posting FUD, but haven't observed any increase in actual gamers experiencing it on forums or irl.
 
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Not game discs, but a few Dvd's and Blu-ray's have had issues. I remember LaserDiscs being very prone to this.
 
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