This is bad for many reasons:

- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?

- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.

- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.

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basch 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game."

What game plays off the disc itself? Most games copy to the ssd and then just download a new full copy of the game from the cloud the second the copy from the disc is done.

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HerbManic 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah it was the Ps4/Xbox 1 generation where it became mandatory. That said some games would allow you to boot the game half way through the install and use both the HDD data and Blu Ray data at the same time, this was generally pretty slow as it was still trying to install at the same time.

That is if there isn't a patch, otherwise it will just download most of it again like you said.

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klausa 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's mandatory for literally all (native) PS5/XSX games; because that means the games can rely on SSD speeds and not worry about supporting fetching data from the spinning disks.

	▲	HerbManic 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I thought as much but wasn't 100% certain.

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basch 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a lot of AAA games I havent tried, but why are the launch day patches Ive experienced so gigantic?

Why do games need to download textures, sounds, videos over again? I just can't understand why a 100GB game has a 60GB patch etc, other than purposeful obfuscation or complete disregard for care.

	▲	klausa 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ironically, frequently _because of_ compression. AIUI the process of building asset packs and compressing them can mean that modifying a single texture can mean complete reshuffling of the resulting file; and that means redownloading the whole compiled "pack".

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bob1029 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.

I have 2 classes of SSD in my system. I've got 512gb of extremely fast, high quality NVMe storage. Then I've got 4tb of the cheapest bullshit I could find on Amazon. I put the big games on my crappy ssd. The performance difference is not something I care about anymore.

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chillfox 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, guess I will keep buying games years after release when they have been patched and are cheaper.

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jayd16 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This likely has little bearing on install size. Maybe you would save some download size but I kind of doubt it.

Day 1 patches have been a thing for years. This honestly is not new.