Posted by giuliomagnifico 4 days ago
The issue was the fact that everybody assumed that the DVD-R/W discs had roughly the same lifetime as actual DVDs and that turned out to be woefully incorrect.
Though there were times were RW discs cost as much as normal ones, and some friends of mine defaulted to buying RW even for stuff that was write once. I didn't get that, but for them the ability to, maybe, reuse the disc outweighed any reliability issues.
When I was a kid I read that you can format DVD-RW in a way that makes Windows see it as a normal filesystem. The next step was "can you install a video game onto a disc?" and the answer was "nope, you cannot, at least not Lego Star Wars".
Also, there was a strange phenomenon that I'd love to see someone explain. I burned The Sims 2 onto CDs. The game worked. After some time the disc would fail at a file called voice1.package. I burned a second disc, which would again last some time, and then fail at the same exact file. I went through many discs, each one displaying the same behavior.