In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.

On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.

>very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment

Side question, do you happen to play games that don't have a gun or a ball in it? I always hear people say these things about modern games and it's almost always turns out to be people who play call of duty , sports games and maybe they have played something like assassin's creed or a racing game once in a while, and have never played any indie or non AAA games or anything that isn't made in USA or Japan. I agree there's a lot of dreadful about the gaming industry right now, but there are so many games worth playing that it's just sad to read stuff like this

A PS5 Bluray can hold 100GB of data, sure some AAA titles are in excess of 100GB, although that is still 100GB that the player doesn't have to download, plus they enable re-sell-ability and partially maintain the status quo of "owning" a title.

> In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games

I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.

In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.

Memory for Switch games is more and more expensive, or at least I assume that's why so few physical games have come out for the Switch 2 (plus the whole "key-card" thing with no game date on the carts). With discs you could still use them to install a game, even include multiple discs if you need to. But as another poster noted, for a game that'll sell a ton like GTA6, it's all about just killing the resale market to make just that much more money.

And on a personal note, I feel we are living in a gaming golden age, so many amazing titles, especially indie ones, out there in every conceivable genre. If anything the problem is finding them, since there's so much being released these days. And I say this as someone who still also plays older games (especially 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen).

> but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me

These likely degrade in 5-10 years, and have you seen the price of NAND lately? AAA gaming is going to get to be out-of-reach because of storage costs.

While this is true, it is a sign of the customer losing control over their purchases. When the servers go dark, the game does too.

Yes there are some practicality issues with physical media but they are kind of trivial to the costs of just handing over all control to the publishers.

same. the last game i purchased that i enjoyed was cyberpunk, although that also got boring because at release it had some issues..

i recently bought battlefield 6 and that has been fun, but even then idk how to describe it. there's just no soul anymore.

i don't think it is because i'm getting older. back in the day there were teamspeak communities that ONLY played battlefield, and that was really fun.

now it is some discord servers, nobody really plays 1 game, but many on rotation. so for me, it feels like every game is just solo with whatever randoms show up.

so i've stopped playing lol. i like to think i got to play some cool games during the golden era, before enshittification, where people formed communities around one game.