I never sold any of my oldies goldies, so, physical copies just take space.

My prefered method is to generally buy games on Steam and if one of them I consider a classic that i might want to return to in the distant future, I’ll buy then again from GOG and store them on an external drive.

I’ve been a gamer since 1985 and all games that still work from 1980-2000 are the ones that were pirared, had no copy protection, or had a really simple protection that just checked if you had the manual of other peripheral. i.e. the ones that can be transfered from one storage media to another.

GOG copies probably have the greatest longevity.