With DS and 3DS cartridges, it's worth highlighting that doomsday scenarios of swathes of game copies dying imminently seem very unlikely. In the case of the physical box and cartridge existing, yes, that could be true to a degree, but the functionality of the technology is something else entirely.

There's a tendency, especially in debates between those that prefer digital game purchases to physical copies, for collectors to suggest their copies are 'forever'. So what sort of lifespans are we looking at? Well, it depends. It's important to recognise that cartridges, like their disc-based chums, will encounter reliability issues down the line due to acknowledged lifespan limitations. That's the difference between modern media and our example of books, of course technology based on memory cards or discs aren't forever, they're mechanical devices that will fail. However, it's important to recognise that cartridges, like their disc-based chums, will encounter reliability issues down the line due to acknowledged lifespan limitations. It seems early for these games to be failing, and seemingly in reasonable numbers one possibility is that a specific PAL manufacturing run had either cheap or faulty components in the process, as even the memory associated with DS and 3DS cartridges shouldn't be dying this early.

In case you missed it, this has come into rather sharp focus with talk online of numerous PAL copies of PokГ©mon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire starting to fail, with some players stating their copies have long since died. It's becoming increasingly apparent that our physical copies of games, which we likely think of as 'permanent' in our own minds, are vulnerable to eventual wear and tear. Yet when we talk about problems keeping games alive we often refer back to the NES era or earlier, or the dreaded 'disc-rot' of early systems that used that particular technology. The video game industry is barely half a century old (though you can argue it stretches back around 60-70 years), but is running into serious issues around preservation. There are also extensive projects to digitise these materials, creating permanent backups in cloud storage so that those pieces of history will never be lost. Manuscripts and first editions are kept in carefully managed vault-like facilities, where humidity and access is carefully managed. In book preservation, processes are established and closely followed.

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