Last time I brought this up, which was on my review blog, it was just the new GTA game going without a disc, and now it’s just all of PlayStation within a couple years according to the current plan. There are several layers of irony here, including this being the same company that made the video about sharing physical games easily versus whatever half-baked idea there was for the Xbone at the time that didn’t make it to launch thankfully, as well as this being the very brand spawned because of optical discs, with the initial idea being an add-on or hybrid system with the SNES to give it disc games, before a falling out with Nintendo spun it off into a direct competitor. Of course with the advance of technology and whatnot, it just feels inevitable at some point, especially when looking back at the ad they made for the PS9 back when the PS2 was current, where by 2078 the PS9 will just be some glass orb full of nanomachines the player snorts like drugs and then a bunch of fantastical stuff happens like in a cologne ad all backed by technobabble.
This isn’t even the first time Sony has wanted to move out of physical games. Back on the PSP, there was this experimental run where some games wouldn’t get released on UMD in some regions, such as Echochrome and Patapon 2 in the North America region. The latter did eventually end up with a full UMD release apparently after looking some things up, but initially it was sold in stores as one of those “code in box” releases, the earliest example I can think of though there might be others before it I haven’t found out about or remembered yet.
As well, there was the PSP Go, a version of the PSP that slid out its controls like a fancy mid-2000s phone and only played downloaded games due to it leaving out the optical drive. By that point the shortcomings of that format were becoming apparent between increased battery usage (though a healthy battery could withstand a couple movies or several hours of games depending) and in some cases absurdly long load times to where some games actually had install options to save core data to flash memory to get to things quicker, so they had some justification in the idea, but it was also seen as a disadvantage to be lacking a major option to play games, especially considering the import market.
There are a lot of parts to this whole physical games thing, but the biggest concept I feel is just the ability to access games in their intended form. If the game’s fully on a piece of media and someone has a machine that can use it, that’s the simplest way, other than just being built into the machine itself. Of course, that’s ended up much more complicated with the advent of “game key discs” as I’ll call them generally, named for the Switch 2’s Game Key Cards following that established pattern. For a while now, some major game publishers like Activision, Ubisoft, and Microsoft have decided to only ship a very bare minimum of data on a pressed disc and require the player to download the whole game as a day 0 patch of sorts. The Switch 2’s version of this is an official option for publishers to go cheap on boxed releases, but apparently there’s also a way to just share the install data between systems locally, so I’ve heard, which would at least be a step up from needing to use the servers directly.
This one site I found a while ago, Does It Play, has been tracking various physical releases to see how complete they are out of the box and without any updates, which is all good to know for future reference especially, given companies can just decide to shut off servers whenever they feel for cost reasons or whatnot. Some digital storefronts are already closed for most of the initial round of majorly-connected consoles, with Sony finally getting around to shutting down the PS3 and Vita stores for real this time, after that one time several years back where they almost did but at the last minute dropped the idea for the time being. They did close the PSP store then though, so this would just be the rest of their unfinished business. Even with the storefronts closed, at least the general updates and some online functionality are still there for the most part and for the time being, but it’s only a matter of time. And that’s where that access concept comes up. While “game key discs” and such work now, and they’re easily transferrable in general which opens up availability for the secondhand market and participating libraries, it’s still locked down on systems that are already locked down to begin with.
Then there’s the case of PC games. Those have effectively gone all-digital by this point, with most PCs being shipped without any optical drives, at least partially thanks to the runaway success of Steam alongside several other game download storefronts. Some people say that when PCs dropped their optical drives, nobody missed them. Those people haven’t met me, the guy who has two active desktop machines with writable DVD drives. I bet they also don’t think people miss headphone jacks on phones when I’ve heard plenty of complaints over that and I still also insist on having a phone with one. Bluetooth headphones are neat and all but it’s all about options.
When the announcement about the all-digital future of PlayStation happened, a lot of people apparently decided they’d rather switch over to Steam on PC than continue with the PS5 and onward, which is weird to think about, given they’re switching from one soon-to-be-all-digital platform to an entirely digital one. However, there’s also tons more games on Steam in general, including a whole bunch of actually good ones that aren’t just asset store flips or generated slop and whatnot, and a lot of the older ones can still be made to work on current PCs, ranging from nearly instant to “I’ve spent hours troubleshooting this and I might finally have it working mostly”. And that’s just Steam. There’s other stores, even if Steam is the dominating one, including the DRM-free ones like GOG and itch.io. Even without physical media being a major thing on PC at this point, it’s still an option sometimes, like installing older games or the occasional indie thing that’s made out as more of a novelty at this point and might come on a flash drive rather than a disc.
Meanwhile the backwards compatibility thing on PlayStation started falling apart during the PS3 era, with later models removing hardware support for PS2 games, though still keeping PS1 compatibility weirdly enough, probably due to emulation reasons, and then the PS4 came out and that can’t even read CDs at all, even just audio CDs. Somehow Xbox kept up backwards compatibility the best out of the current major console makers, and even that’s spotty with only specific games having support through emulation on the modern systems. And of course Nintendo is on and off about it but also tends to have an emulation option for much older games when they’re not porting or remaking specific ones.
As things are now, the physical format for whatever media, depending on where the data’s from and how specific it’s narrowed down, is either thriving or dying. Part of that of course is going to be what’s on that media to begin with. If a system isn’t having a lot of interesting games lately then naturally its media sales overall would drop. Additionally if people would rather just get the digital version directly rather than get the “game key disc” to then download it, that’s another thing, falling somewhat under convenience, also a major thing, and on top of that supply in general. If there’s a short supply of the physical version and it sells out quickly, the publisher might go ahead and order more copies, but during that time it’s likely that people will just go for the digital version instead of waiting potentially a month or more for the whole supply chain thing to work itself out.
Outside of games, physical formats for music, TV shows, and movies are still happening, despite the availability of streaming supposedly superseding the act of going all the way to a store to get a disc, or having one shipped from a central warehouse directly. It’s probably picking up due to how those streaming services are going about their business, gradually increasing monthly fees and throwing more ads into the lower tiers as well as shuffling around what things are available where. I’m still hunting down music CDs myself, with a major purpose of that being so I can copy tracks from those onto my old-school MP3 player. It’s easier for me to do that than to figure out the whole “offline” thing for something like Spotify on a phone, plus I’m still finding CDs pretty cheap for the most part. Also sometimes DVDs and Blu-Rays. I even know how to get video off of most DVDs fairly easily at this point if I want to bring something for real long trips.
Long story short, it’s complicated. I like the availability and persistence of physical media, but digital, when done properly, is pretty convenient. I’ve got a fair bit of games in both categories in a number of formats across several systems. Also digital storefronts lower the barrier of entry for getting weird indie stuff out there due to not having to negotiate manufacturing stuff on low budgets, for better or worse. There’s a lot more cool stuff but also a lot more cash grabs. As much as the big games industry seems to want to eventually be rid of physical copies in general, if they want it to work they have to seriously commit, including keeping games playable on increasingly further systems down the line. Or they could just surpass the whole dedicated hardware thing in general and just make everything some kinda PC that runs just about anything, including that whole back catalog, with an ideally low barrier to setup and playability, price included. Then they just have to compete with, or become a part of, the major Steam sales, an increasingly oversaturated market itself as it is. Discoverability is becoming a more apparent issue by the year.