Physical is not gong anywhere for a long time. It will eventually become a niche market with a higher price tag, but it won't be discontinued anytime soon. If physical media was gong to die, we would have already seen the end of Books, Newspapers, Music, and Movies. The shelf space and demand have shrunk, but it is not dead. As time goes on less and less games will get physical releases, but it will shrink for decade until it reaches a low bar as a niche media, then it will level out.

Next gen will most likely launch with devices that support physical media but options for non PM consoles should pop up over then generation. With PS Now and Game Pass more and more gamers will go to the Netflix business model for their gaming. More people will buy digital for the enhanced value, as platforms expand to more form factors. I think we will leave this gen with PS4/XBO at around 55% digital. Next gen will start off above 50% physical due to early core gamers/collectors adopting first, but will quickly jump to 60 & 70% as the broader market joins the next round.

Noo,and when it happens i will stop buying new games,iam not going to spend thousands to buy a licennce of a game they can easily withdraw.

Why would I care how much money they make? If they want more, they could also charge more.

And this. Though ‘thousands’ would be ‘hundreds’ in my case I guess.

I'd say they purposely push streaming where they can in a certain way.

Don't have good enough internet, and won't for decades? Love your physical library? Here's your typical home console with all the fixins for $399-$499. Your welcome.

Don't like having to pay for a disc drive you'll never use because your always buying digital? Don't like having to pay extra for internal storage that you need to swap out immediately due to those digital games, so you can add a much much larger internal or external drive anyway? Then you probably already have, or could have good enough internet to stream. Here's a $199-$299 streaming console. Your welcome.

But haven't they already addressed that as you can download most of the game before it launches? I know they do that with some games, but it'd be easy to have all publishers do that.

Don't most games MAKE you install the game to a certain degree now? How is this any different?

As a side-note, what would the incentive be for stores to still carry a company’s consoles if they can’t sell the games? Stores don’t make much off the systems themselves (unless used).

The facts are physical media is a antiquated thing. When games this gen make you install them due to not being able to read them fast enough on disk what more proof do you need? Honestly.

They will still sell the games. They just won't sell discs anymore. Instead they will offer codes that you can use to download a game. It's already happening, especially for Xbox One I'm seeing more and more code cards in the stores while the shelf-space for discs has decreased considerably.

I think it's possible that Next-Gen ditches optimal media. Blu-Rays are just too dann slow. By the time games get to sizes of 200 GB+, which will happen rather sooner than later thanks to 4K, you would be messing around with 4 discs for 8 hours just for a game to install on your hard drive.

Download speeds will only increase. Sure, there are still some special cases where it's not an option. But I can See Sony and MS offering some Kind of workaround for that.