I accidentally left a CD with a bunch of photos on it from 2005 in a shed outside until 2022 and when I mounted it, it ran great. I got back a bunch of photos from 2005 that I thought were lost. That shed gets hot as fuck during summer and then our Maine winters as famously harsh.

I was surprised the weather didn’t kill the CD so as an experiment I burned a bunch of memes onto a CD and buried it in a plastic food container. I let it stay there a year and allowed the deep frost of winter to get to it. I dug it up a year later and it was fine.

So this is just a sample size of 2 but to me it seems normal everyday CDs are actually pretty tough and stable, even through brutal temperature changes and wet or frozen weather.

They rot?

You technically don’t own games. You own a license to play them. This has always been the case going back at least to the 80s if not before (first time I noticed this was Dr. Mario on the NES when reading the manual as I’d just learned how to read). If your disc is ruined you can contact them for a replacement disc since your license was not destroyed or forfeited. This is also why you are legally permitted to make one backup copy. Saves them from having to do the replacement themselves.

Fun fact about cd, over half of the data present on a common cd is used for error correction and because of that it’s still readable normally even in case of it having several sections significantly damaged.

I stored a cd R in a closet since 2004. It was sandwiched in a book for 2 years. I got curious and read it. All the files were there perfect. I copied the information and burned it to a Mdisc blue ray. In the mean time, I lost several gigs over the years from hard drive failures. One was internal of a laptop. Very unexpected. Another was an external harddrive.