I can’t remember the last time I saw a game do that. I remember during the early 8th gen days they did indeed do that, but from what I recall that practice started to dissolve late that generation. Well after quad layer discs showed up. For standard size blue ray discs like what PS4 uses they’re just not big enough.
I wasn’t arguing against physical media itself. Simply having to carry multiple discs for a single game. The MAJORITY of people don’t want that. And even on the subject of there being demand for a physical disc of GTA 6, you really think the flame wars on the internet represent the majority of consumers? History has shown time and time again the internet, or congregated groups like Reddit do not represent the vast majority of consumers. If this was such a huge problem in the industry, people wouldn’t continue to buy digital media, or continue to spend money on microtransactions.
You are correct that they have multi layer discs now to handle those storage constraints and that was my mistake, but the fact is that the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash storage. Modern AAA games are DESIGNED around them because of the large scale. Even hypothetically if you put GTA 6 on a quad layer disc the damn thing wouldn’t run due to having to stream high resolution assets on the fly in real time at sub 100 MB/s speeds.
I mean……come on man. You can’t even argue against that. It’s just fact. We need a successor to optical media to accomplish that. We have nothing AFAIK.
Yes we have quad layer discs but they haven’t sold well, Sony AFAIK is the only manufacturer, and the manufacturing cost is ludicrous. And going back to my previous point, all of that is fucking meaningless when the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash memory storage which is required for most modern AAA titles.
I understand what you’re saying, and yes hypothetically they could put the games on multiple discs to transfer over to your hard drive. But ignoring the manufacturing costs, you’re still limited to the read/write speeds of those disc drives. Transferring data from disc to hard drive is a little faster but not by much. Even if the game is at minimum 100GB, and assuming 30GB per disc hypothetically, that’s about 3 discs….it would take literal hours to transfer the game over to the console. Versus most people with decent internet simply downloading it directly, around 2-3 hours hypothetically. Sometimes even less than that if you have 800mb/s internet which is extremely common nowadays.
This wouldn’t be a big deal if the games were smaller in size, as history as shown. But they’re just too damn big now. And quite honestly from a consumer perspective I think the industry has shown nobody wants to go back to owning multiple discs/physical media for a single product. I’m old enough to remember needing multiple floppies to install certain games. I don’t miss that. Not to mention you HAVE to be there to babysit it so when the data finishes copying over, you have to remove the disc, put disc 2 in, etc. I don’t miss that, consumers have shown they don’t miss that.
So I understand the sentiment and I do miss owning physical media. I’m happy there is a movement going on for collecting. I myself have multiple 4k movies and media on disc. I wish more research would go into developing new technologies so we can bring that back. For gaming though, it’s just not viable with current technology.
Edit: Yes quad layer blueray exists but the manufacturing costs for that are ludicrous, they don’t sell well so there’s no insensitive, and regardless you’re limited to the abysmal speeds of optical media drives.
On the lack of a physical disc, I’m gonna play devils advocate here and just remind some of you that, while it’s fucking stupid these companies are selling boxes with codes in them, as that is absolutely not a physical release, the days of physical media are over.
Blueray discs max out at around 4Mbp/s write speeds. Meanwhile SSDs can read data at 400-500 MB/s, and NVME Gen 3 alone can do at minimum 1.5 GB/s. The fact is that modern games are just too massive in scale to warrant those slow speeds on disc. Even ignoring the physical constants of Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head, (GTA 6 is guaranteed to be over 100GB) the game is constantly streaming data at rates that those discs just can not feed to the hardware.
I’m personally just sick and tired of people getting up and arms about this, acting like it’s a choice to not bundle games on physical media anymore when there is a genuine physical limitation to this. To clarify I personally believe that these companies and researchers could come up with a newer technology for this. So, it’s not JUST physical limitations. I think Sony and Microsoft, and the various other publishers know that in the long run they save money without having to manufacture physical media, plus digital sales effectively make the used game market extinct. But that takes money and time to develop new technologies. We have flash storage that is 30x faster nowadays. It’s not worth it.
Feel free to ignore my rant. Just had to get this out as I’m sick of seeing misinformation spread that they can absolutely get these games on disc. They can’t.
Oh yeah and the price is ludicrous….even though 99% of people will be buying on launch. This game is gonna sell like hotcakes.
No misunderstanding. My point stands that standard blueray discs on PS4/PS5 as an example do not use quad layer discs, and they’re too small to hold 80GB+ AAA media like most games are nowadays.
I completely understand the difference between streaming from disc and transferring to hard storage. Both are true at the same time. I haven’t seen a single, large AAA game transfer from disc to SSD this generation. Ever piece of physical AAA games I’ve owned from 2020 onward has had a code built into the box. I also haven’t seen a game stream from disc since late 7th generation.
If my arguments were all over the place and incoherent I apologize. I’m not good at debates. But to be clear I fully understand the difference.