Yesterday, I got my hard copy of The Division. Two and a half hours after putting the disc in, I was playing the game. With discs taking almost as long to install as digital downloads, taking up just as much hard drive space, and being much more inconvenient to acquire, I just don’t see the point anymore.
Microsoft was planning to make discs practically irrelevant. The idea was to make the Xbox One almost entirely reliant on digital downloads, and if discs were used, they would essentially just be vessels to install the game, and they would prove you had the “rights” to it.
Year after year, digital revenue continues to climb as more and more players download games from PSN and XBL directly (and of course PC players have been doing this for years).
Now, the process of getting a game on a disc is not simply “pop and play.” Rather, you have to go through a lengthy installation/patching process that can often take nearly as long as it would if you were doing a digital download. But with a digital download, most games allow you to pre-load titles ahead of release, so you don’t have to muck through that on launch day. Not so with discs you acquire on launch day, and you will go through that process regardless.
Most of these games will still take up a huge chunk of your hard drive, even if you’re playing them “from the disc.” And most of the time, despite leaving a load of GBs on your console after an install, you will still have to pop in the disc when you want to play.
The arguments for discs are often directly conflicting with one another. People say they miss having a physical game collection on their shelf they can look at, and they want the ability to play old games when they want. But the other prime argument is that people want the ability to play a game and instantly turn around and pawn it at GameStop, which makes those other two reasons pointless, as you will never actually have a collection of games, if you keep selling them back for new ones.
With how online-connected most games are now, in the future, you may not be able to play them at all with no servers. I’m not saying that’s right, but that’s reality, and it’s a separate sort of problem that has nothing to do with discs vs. digital. Both versions of the game will be affected the same way.
The GameStop argument may be the most compelling, and it always was, but this pawnshop economy seems less and less necessary as time has gone on. As I said, PC gaming has ditched discs for years now, and they’re doing just fine.
