Future of Physical Media in consoles - end of disks?

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DPsx7 said:

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.

What? They did? Dammit! Why didn't anyone tell me?

Immersiveunreality said:
Great , less waste.

I don't agree with this argument because the math doesn't back it up. The amount of plastic waste that comes from physical games is vastly overstated.

First of all, most games don't just get thrown out in the garbage. In fact, I would imagine relatively few do. The amount of discs and game cases I've discarded over the past 20 years amounts to zero. Also, game discs and cases can be recycled, so it's not like they have to end up in a landfill if someone wants to throw them out.

But let's just assume that every console gamer decided to throw all their physical copies into the garbage. How big of a mess would that be?

We do know how many games have been sold on the PS4, so let's focus on that. As of Dec. 31, 2019, there were 1.18 billion PS4 games sold globally. Now, obviously not all of those are physical copies, but let's assume that about 80% of them are, meaning about 945 million discs. A standard-size optical disc is about 13.36 cubic centimeters in volume, so if you melted all those discs down and made a cube out of them, it would be only about 12.6 billion cubic centimeters, which sounds like a lot until you realize that that's a cube only about 23.3 meters per edge. That could fit into my small-ish back yard, and would only be a tiny section of the typical landfill. And the game cases (original dimensions, meaning not melted down, since they are storage boxes) occupy only about 23.67 times the volume, meaning a roughly cubic shaped stack of 945 million PS4 game cases would be about 67 meters per edge.

So, even if every PS4 owner threw out all of their physical copies, case and all, the amount of garbage would be far, far from ruinous (in the U.S. alone, all the garbage tossed in one year amounts to a cube 805 meters tall, which is over 1700 times the volume of a 67-meter cube), and I'd submit that only a tiny percentage of those games actually will be discarded. Even if 10% of all physical PS4 games get tossed into the garbage over the next decade, it would barely register compared to how much trash we produce in general (only 0.005% of the U.S.'s annual garbage output, if I did my math right). Realistically, less than 1% of games get thrown out in the garbage, so a cube of trashed PS4 discs would probably be at most about 5 meters tall. You could fit that into the video games department at your local Best Buy.

Yes even if everybody discarded their games and cases and no compacting or recycling occured it would still be something very small. But well we discard very little, recycle plastic and then it would be very very very small amount of landfilled plastic.