For carts this is (mostly[1]) true but honestly I'd be pretty surprised if the average CD outlasts a console that used mostly flash to store the games on. Sure

For carts this is (mostly[1]) true but honestly I'd be pretty surprised if the average CD outlasts a console that used mostly flash to store the games on. Sure if the flash has had consistent write cycles for years it might fail eventually but probably people will be finding games intact on wiis for a long time yet. A lot of video game CDs barely lasted the life of their console without becoming basically useless. [1] There are mask roms that are prone to failure, and some NES for eg. games are vulnerable to progressive failure of their battery backed RAM chips, which were not just for save backup but were also often used as extra RAM with a lot of write cycles (and to be clear, I don't mean the battery dying - I mean stuck or flipped bits on the ram itself).