Out of all the problems with GTA VI so far physical media is pretty low on my list… I feel like the sky high price, subscription, in-game things potentially locked behind game versions, and so on is more worrying.
I miss physical media as much as anyone but there is really no point in a physical release.
I bought GTA V PC on disc because I had slow internet. There were 5 discs and 2 of the brand-new sealed package discs wouldn’t read. I spent half the night polishing the discs with toothpaste and finally got the install to succeed. And then the first time I launched it, it required downloading huge update files before it would let me play. That took many more hours.
Pirates are likely to have the better experience.
Yup. If buying isnt owning…
People would buy this game if you could only install it while someone twists their balls.
No disc won’t stop sales…
nah, at some point we’ll go back to cartridges, but theyll just be ssd drives
Dear god, I can’t imagine a game publisher wanting to distribute SSD’s with their games on them. The price of memory is skyrocketing right now – not just RAM, but solid state flash storage too.
Chad Kroeger wants you to look at this graaaaph and weep.
im definitely being hopeful that in the future things will be better that the prices of that stuff wont be insane like today
I mean I love the idea of a physical library of branded thumb drives - in an alternate universe, USB would be fast enough to stream an entire game from a thumb drive, and your entire game library would be stored in bespoke furniture, like this cassette container.
But yeah, every big tech boom is followed by a big tech bust: dotcoms, crypto, VR/metaverse. AI will eventually join their ranks, it may just take longer than we would hope. And when it does, the price of hardware will eventually stabilize, with software to follow.
If there’s any optimistic “stick it to the man” future to be dreamed of, it’s one where publishers go back to shipping Big Box-style packages, with 3-5 Blu Ray discs. But even that is woefully unrealistic - Rockstar is just cementing what Valve has known for years: why pay for packaging when the player just downloads the whole game anyway.
