Future of Physical Media in consoles - end of disks?

[DonFerrari]

DPsx7 said:

DonFerrari said:

And cheap cards don't have enough speed anyway.

I don't think it's the speed that matters. Anything local installs faster than a DL and it's a lot more future proof. I've had this argument with someone else. Discs are yours to protect, if something happens then you're to blame. Digital, they can take it away for any reason or you lose access because an account got hacked or server went down. These you don't have control over.

Shadow1980 said:

I'm going to echo what some others have said in that if the console market ever abandons physical media, then I abandon them. I don't care if it's disks or cartridges, but I demand a physical format. Aside from a few Virtual Console releases on the Wii U and 3DS, the only digital game I've spent money on in the past decade was Blaster Master Zero on the Switch.

Hate to be that person, I waited it out and sure enough LRG released both BMZ games on disc/cart. That was one game I always wanted a sequel to but couldn't bring myself to spend more than $10 on a digital game. Other than PSN freebies and a few deep discounts I really don't shop there.

hunter_alien said:

This. Honestly, the selfishness of gamers is a bit sickening. Do you know how much plastic pollution comes from those 3 billion+ discs that are printed every generation? Or the storage and transportation and their effect on the environment. Honestly, as much as I loath DRM practices, I am glad that discs and cartridges are going the way of the dodo. They will pretty much become niche collector's items.

You're not serious right? How is it waste if you're keeping them? As for storage and transport those will always be things for any goods so the effect is minimal.

Unless I mistook the point made, it was that going cartridge instead of BD you wouldn't need to install on the console, and the other point was that 16 and 32Gb cartridges are getting cheaper. Neither of those really makes a difference, because games for 9th gen will need 64Gb or more available space more likely than not and the speed of cartridges even though higher than BD won't make install go away (at least for PS and Xbox).

About the plastic waste someone posted a time ago that if all the plastic of all the games ever printed was compacted it would be a very small chunk of plastic.