physical games won't go away, but they may be relegated to collector items and probably distributed on formats that need no special hardware in the console itself, like USB sticks

Publishers like download because there is no second-hand market. That's pretty much all it gets them in reality though, as mass producing and shipping BluRays is basically pennies on their costs. They also lose out on the gift-side of the market, and old-skool shops don't promote or devote shelf space to downloadable games for obvious reasons.

Personally I like things like books, CDs and DVDs because you can go to someone's house and see what sort of things they have on their shelves. It's starting to be an increasingly expensive luxury though...

Even 9th gen from the reports so far sell more disc version than discless even with 100USD difference, so it isn't the end of physical media yet. And well if physical midia is removed then the used market is finished so I would most likely go be a pirate in PC or something similar.

vivster said: xl-klaudkil said: Noo,most games can be played offline without the need of the internet, yea ya cant download any patches, thats why i do my research to see if a game is broken at launch or not.  Also almost all limitedrungames  are with patches on disc(there now at 370+ physical ps4 games released) Thats the future of physical media, companies like lrg. It's not about patches. It's about the console manufacturer being able to remove your ability to play a game or even read the disc at the push of a button. At that point you don't own the game anymore. That's what DRM is. You don't own the product, but only a license that can be revoked at any moment. On a console there is zero distinction between a physical and a digital game in terms of game ownership. Actual game ownership today is exclusive to PC and even there it's not with some games or only with jumping through hoops.

That's a big piece of bollocks, noo sony or anyone else won't just " push" a button so your ps4 bricks and cant play your physical games anymore, have any proof that even exist?

And explain how they will do that if your(or mine) ps4 isnt even connected.

Digital games are air, you own nothing  but air and a liscene to play.

So long as people keep buying physical media it will continue to be on consoles.

I don't trust console makers with online prices so I'll skip a new PS until much further in the generation if the next console is an all digital and wait for a mega sale. There's absolutely no way I'm buying an all digital console now with the increased prices on their web store.

xl-klaudkil said: vivster said: It's not about patches. It's about the console manufacturer being able to remove your ability to play a game or even read the disc at the push of a button. At that point you don't own the game anymore. That's what DRM is. You don't own the product, but only a license that can be revoked at any moment. On a console there is zero distinction between a physical and a digital game in terms of game ownership. Actual game ownership today is exclusive to PC and even there it's not with some games or only with jumping through hoops. That's a big piece of bollocks, noo sony or anyone else won't just " push" a button so your ps4 bricks and cant play your physical games anymore, have any proof that even exist? And explain how they will do that if your(or mine) ps4 isnt even connected. Digital games are air, you own nothing  but air and a liscene to play.

I have no idea how Sony would be able to prevent you from playing a physical offline game without breaking the law.

xl-klaudkil said: That's a big piece of bollocks, noo sony or anyone else won't just " push" a button so your ps4 bricks and cant play your physical games anymore, have any proof that even exist? And explain how they will do that if your(or mine) ps4 isnt even connected. Digital games are air, you own nothing  but air and a liscene to play.

I get reminded of that every time I try to play a digital game on my ps4 pro when it's off-line (it's not set as my primary ps4) Everything is locked. Physical games work fine yet anything digital has a nice lock symbol on it, no access.

For some games physical editions are pretty pointless, like Dreams and FS 2020. Others I rather have a disc.

It's up to us, the consumer to not fall for that shit. They reckon the cost of an optical Blu Ray drive is about $20 USD and yet the disk-less PS5 is $100 cheaper..... Why? So they can lure you into their all digital future and PS5 storefront.....

It's a trap!

The moment physical media is gone from consoles, I'm too. There's simply not enough competition in the digital space to keep prices reasonable, and digital has other disadvantages as well (mainly related to longevity). I'm just not going to pay extra price to get less in terms of longevity while publishers make more money than they do from physical.

Depends. I think the fact that most games are fully installed on the console has more to do with game devs not wanting to deal with partially installed games. A Blu-Ray disc can sustain read speeds up to 72MB/s (and unlike SD cards, this read speed is constant, no caching BS that drops your performance off a cliff after a few Gigabytes). With Blu-Ray discs being able to hold up to 128GB's a piece, being quite durable and relatively cheap to manufacture, I see them sticking around.
It would be a much more efficient use of space if a physical game from a Blu-Ray could be partially installed to minimize boot and loading times, with the SSD pulling data off the disc as a cache to quickly stream data when the game requires it.

The largest problem I see is that we've kind of plateaued in SSD's getting cheaper and/or larger in capacity. The larger capacity and cheap"er" SSD's are QLC, which means they're quite slow. PLC technology is on the horizon, which means if we just wait long enough, SSD's are going to be nearly as slow as reading from a Blu-Ray disc.
Furthermore, Blu-Ray Discs might still get some development as sony uses them as a base for their Optical Disc Archive storage (Blu-Rays are much more durable then DVD's and CD's ever were).