[GA inside] What to do with physical copies of PC games (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM)?

You could keep them and run them in ScummVM 🤗🤗

Keep what you genuinely value, sell the more valuable online, and donate the least noteworthy.

I have quite a few old physical games. I always prefer physical media, however, a lot of the old games just aren't compatible with newer computers. If you're looking to give them away, you might as well try posting them on facebook, at least they'd likely end up with someone who wants to play them.

Just out of curiosity: have you checked their market value on Ebay? I sold most of my physical game boxes years ago, and they already had some collector's value back then. Okay, those were mostly DOS games (on floppy disks), with things like maps, printed manuals and so on. So, it kinda makes sense they would have some collector's value (probably a lot more if I had waited selling them). But maybe your CD-ROMs also have some value by now? Especially with the original boxes.

I faced a similar "problem" a while ago, and I started a thread here at SG to see if anyone just wanted to get them off my hands. Someone did, "problem" was solved.

(Hey, Pizurk, if you read this, what did you do to those games? Just curious if you played them, sold them or trashed them in my stead... :D :D)

Cheers!

Some of them won't be worth anything, as they will have activation codes for Origin or Steam (looking at you, Need For Speed).
As others have said, keep the ones you have an emotional attachment to. All else you may as well sell on fb marketplace/ebay or whatever.
If you don't want any money for them, then sure, give them to a library or thrift shop.
I have an extremely large collection myself, and it's time I did something as well.

If you have the box, store them away as collector items for 20-30 years, then sell them.

If I were you, I'd just keep them, it's a pretty cool collection to have, but if you don't want to or can't keep them, then I'd say the best idea is to either sell them or give them away to people who collect older physical copies of games.

I had kept only CDs/DVDs that are somehow important to me (like one of the first licensed CDs I bought around 98, that is by chance also has a rare metall case or with games like Morrowind/Ultima Online in wich I spent hundreds of hours). The rest were sold online on a secondary market during clean up.

Posting on a facebook group is a fast and surefire way to do this, whether you decide to sell or give it away.

I'd prefer to keep them around since you actually own the physical copies, instead of just owning a license to play the game in digital stores. If you are set on ridding of them then, well, others have already given better advice.

Make art with them.

Put your collection on shelf, so everyone can see them.

Keep the ones you like that don't require an internet connection, give away the rest.

Try find a local-ish retro-gamer group with collectors / gamers, and try to give it there. There are many people who had any of these as their childhood game that they enjoyed that much that they want a boxed copy, or lost their copy themselves, and would be overjoyed to see it back on their shelf.

Keep them.
Because you actually own them and not only a license to play them. As long as they don't need any kind of server, they will always work. This is not the case with any digital store, where any license can be revoked at any time. Beware the day Valve will cease to exist and Steam will be taken offline, everything you can not download to a HDD then will be lost forever.

But if you really do not want to keep them, I'd first try to donate them and if that doesn't work, sell them. There is a market for collectors, albeit a small one.

Vote for keeping it.
It would only create undue stress if a complete stranger were to force something too rare on you.

I have some oldies, collected for entirely nostalgic purposes. I also have a hefty collection of Links games and courses (a golf sim, still 20 years after it's last release and no other golf sim is good enough). Since the first ones in 5.25" floppies to the latests in multiple CDs.

What to do with the physical copies? Contact preservation groups and ask them if they need a disc dump for their archives. That way in a few years it'll be spread among collectors. Maybe one of your games is a rare version of a common game, maybe for some reason they don't have some, preservation communities are pretty active and always searching for donators of new stuff.

Since linking actual preservation websites might violate SG rules, I will not do it. But I don't think you'll need much searching because there are many in all gaming areas (PC, consoles, etc.)

I would keep at least GTA IV, NFS The Run and Assassin's Creed. GTA 4 and AC were amazing to me when they came out.