You're viewing a single thread.
What's the point of buying the physical edition then?
There hasn't been one for more than ten years now.
Games stopped fitting on disk media during the PS4/XBOne launch, you've had to download 90% of the game (it's almost like the disc is a product key 🤔) ever since then. Had they decided to, you could have been fucked out of your DRM even WITH A GAME IN YOUR HANDS ever since then.
People are really out here a decade after the death of physical copies acting like NOW it's finally being killed. Shits been dead for years, you just couldn't see it until the game companies finally stopped giving out discs due to it incurring costs with no real value.
The first part of the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy for PS5 came in 2 discs and so will the second part, as confirmed by Sony. All major Nintendo Switch releases come on cartridges aswell. I mean I buy my PC games digitally since forever, but physical games aren't actually dead at all.
I've been buying purely digital since half way in PS3 simply because you can share the games with another account, so if my wife and me want to play something together, we have to buy the game only once. Saves a lot of money but I always missed the feeling of reading the instruction manual and drooling over the artwork.
I remember being a kid and reading the manual of a new game on the way home. Good times.
I still remember swapping like 4 discs for a wow install or a dozen discs for monkey island 2.
Hell I had to swap out discs for Mass Effect 2 even back in 2010. We exceeded one disc a while before internet speeds allowed for digital downloads to be the mainstream way.
That's always been a great detriment to preservation but this stops even trading in or borrowing games, akin to the XboxOne idea which was widely panned. They severely damaged the long-term aspects of physical media by shipping incomplete discs but now they're damaging the short-term benefits too.
I've been almost exclusively PC where physical media died long ago, but there will be piracy and much longer time to buy a product legitimately (look at GoG). Console losing physical copies means a near monopoly on the pricing and distribution of games with no means to recoup costs by selling, rent a game (outside of their first party service) or share with friends. It all sucks.