Summary by Brave Leo AI :
Sony announced that starting in January 2028, it will cease selling new physical game discs for PlayStation, a move that has sparked significant controversy among fans concerned about game preservation and ownership. While the article acknowledges the emotional value of physical collections, it argues that discs are an obsolete and fragile medium that cannot keep up with the massive storage demands of modern games, many of which exceed the 100GB capacity of the highest-tier Blu-ray disc and require extensive day-one downloads. The piece highlights that the industry has already shifted overwhelmingly toward digital, with 78% of sales now digital compared to just 13% in 2013, driven by the impracticality of storing large files on discs and the higher production costs associated with physical media. Ultimately, the author suggests that rather than trying to preserve this “dying medium,” the gaming community should focus on forcing companies like Sony to improve digital consumer rights, ensuring licenses remain stable and ownership is respected, similar to the model used by PC storefronts like GOG.
They could move to a thumb drive (USB), but they won’t.
Not with what storage is costing lately.
Small USB drives are very slow, unfortunately.
Fast ones are pretty expensive.
64GB ~400MiB/s is $15 for Nintendo.
In 2019 a 32GB Switch1 cart was around $9 (or ‘double the cost of a 50GB PS4 BD’ according to Daniel Ahmad)
So it’d be plausible, but would increase the cost of physical games and games would need to decrease their sizing (or require and install and compress the hell out of everything, decompressing on installation - maybe ask FitGirl for some tips!)
Yeah, but like all consoles since the 360 and the PS3 had the capability of copying a game disc to the internal storage in order to have faster operation speeds.
All they would really need to do with this is have it so the system copies the game to the drive like it does currently with most physicals, and then the USB drive would be used as a key or honestly they could even just leave it so you don’t need the USB drive hooked up
Relistically, this could probably even work in video games favor because flash drives would be smaller than their DVD counterparts and would be easier to break and also would have shorter lifespans.
Well even 64GB microSD cards are $35 now.
There’s a price floor to this kind of thing, and no cheaper read only tech has come to replace BDs.
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