Physical media doesn't work when modern games are 100GB or more.

And to answer your question, most consumers don't care. The convenience of being able to buy with a few clicks and download immediately without going to a store or waiting for the mail is far more beneficial to most people than being able to locally archive or replay in 20 years.

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Maxatar 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

PS5 and XBox support Blu-ray discs with capacities up to 100 GB. Both GTA V and GTA IV used multiple discs (there was an installation disc and a play disc). Heck the PC version of GTA V required 7 DVDs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/18hkrvj/you_c...

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ethbr1 an hour ago | parent [-]

The bigger difficulty comes from the increasing complexity of games (feature wise) and their release state.

It's effectively impossible to release a "gold version" game to the quality standards of ~1990 physical media, in 2026.

The surface area for potential gameplay bugs is too large: it'd take another decade of QA polish.

So even if you have physical media for the release day version of a game, what can you do with that? Play a buggy version?

To GP's point about post-release physical editions, it makes more sense to sell something later that rolls up the most critical post-release patches and content.

	▲	tencentshill an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If the game they release on a physical disk is unplayably buggy, do they owe you a refund? Even if online updates make it perfect? They can't require that you play it online unless its not even available physically.

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mrmattyboy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Physical media doesn't work when modern games are 100GB or more.

This is a totally fair point and literally something I haven't even considered.

> most consumers don't care

I know.. I know.. I mostly commented because the linked article _does_ speak about it and that it implied people weren't happy (mostly for re-sell not for archival purposes). But, yes, I get that