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.

Since others already discussed the plastic issue, have you considered this
https://e360.yale.edu/features/energy-hogs-can-huge-data-centers-be-made-more-efficient

All those data centers hosting digital downloads, movies and streaming games use a lot of power to work and for cooling. Save the planet, stay offline.

Data centers are the factories of the digital age. These mostly windowless, featureless boxes are scattered across the globe – from Las Vegas to Bangalore, and Des Moines to Reykjavik. They run the planet’s digital services. Their construction alone costs around $20 billion a year worldwide.

The biggest, covering a million square feet or more, consume as much power as a city of a million people. In total, they eat up more than 2 percent of the world’s electricity and emit roughly as much CO2 as the airline industry. And with global data traffic more than doubling every four years, they are growing fast.

Enh, mostly the same. Still 'burned' with a laser just done all at once unlike traditional burning at home. Whatever, it's all good.

PS5 SSD speed is 4.5Gb and over 9Gb when counting compression.

So the BD transfering 72MB won't really cover that need.

The concept is exactly the same as a record.
There are "pits" in the plastic layer just like a record.

The difference is how those "pits" are sent back to the hardware... A record uses a pin that is dragged over the pits... A CD/DVD/Blu-Ray uses a laser that bounces of a reflective metal layer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_manufacturing

And I quote: "In addition, CD burners write data sequentially, while a CD pressing plant forms the entire disk in one physical stamping operation, similar to record pressing."

Feel free to look at the manufacturing process on Youtube for a more visualized reference point.

Why? I'm looking through what I have installed. The only big ones are the games that keep adding over time (as you'd expect). DLC comes after the fact so we just need to look at the base game. Granted I have a big backlog so I've yet to try RDR2, FF7R, or whatever. A 64gb card is only slightly less than what a disc holds I think.

Yeah couple months ago. I wasn't expecting it but when it showed up in their newsletter I was on that so fast... The original was a bitch, never finished when I was younger but completed it eventually. Honestly between them, Special Reserve Games, Signature Edition Games, Super Rare Games, Iam8bit, or even Playasia with their UK releases a surprising amount of digital games eventually come to disc.

Enh, mostly the same. Still 'burned' with a laser just done all at once unlike traditional burning at home. Whatever, it's all good.

My post was not concerning the raw performance alone, but when you need that performance. No game is going to need to stream the maximum amount of data via the PS5's SSD at all times (unless it's horribly optimised).

People have been predicting the death of gaming for longer. It's not gonna happen, nor will a switch away from physical media without some major adjustments.

Enh, the thing with FN, Rocket, Fall Guys is they're all free. At no point are we forced to pay a cent so I'm ok with 'em. They aren't going to replace my regular games but are good diversions as a break. MTX will only last as long as they find a few to keep buying them. If any game is too invasive, choose something else.

maybe, but it'll still need  cart like port to be elegent, and the only solution currently fast enough on a USB-C form factor is thunderbolt, which is firmly on intel and apple's side.

There is a fucking reason why the XBSX/S uses a proprietary slot for it.

As for the disc speed argument, while BD goes up to 72Mb/s, that is not NEARLY enough for THIS gen, let alone the upcoming one, i mean it wasn't enough for certain wii U games to function at full capacity.

all in all though I think at least console game devs are going to put in effort to compress games at least a bit again starting this gen, and especially so if they have to move to carts in the next one, so at least games would probably still fit on the smallest common size of 128GB. going lower for the base size might negativly influence price... unless you are nintendo and manage to compress what is effectivly a 8th gen AAA console game enough to fit within a high end first gen iphone...

The thing I really don't like about a lot of these F2P games is that in order to get the full experience you need to pay way more than the standard $60 price tag. Even way more than the $60 price tag + $25 Expansion pass. League of Legends is the perfect example of this. I might have 1/5th of the champions in League if I'm lucky. I pretty much made that game my life for 3 years, and I spent about $300 on it to boot. That sort of time/money investment will buy you 5 full priced single player games, and get you the Platinum Trophy on 10 to 20 games.

I think a lot of these F2P games really need to slow down with the MTX. If you wind up spending 5 times more than that game would have cost then F2P is not a good model economically anymore. The real kicker here is that as more and more full priced games add in MTX, collecting or even buying games becomes pointless. The value proposition isn't there anymore. Heck, even as a completely free (No MTX, No nothing. COMPLETELY FREE) offering many games just don't have a good value proposition, because your time alone has value. If a game is full of tedious things that artificially lengthen the game, and don't respect the player's time then the game isn't worth bothering with.

And like I said before. This sort of "Add grind to the game, to sell MTX" model is going to kill my hobby long before physical media dies out.

It sure depends on the game you'll play. AC for example are all over 50Gb if I'm not wrong, CoD the same, most Sony 1st party also.

On the size itself a regular BD is 25 Gb (so a 32Gb stick would cover and still have space for DLCs that perhaps you could download and install on it), a dual layer BD is 50Gb (and gen 8 that was the limit the console accepted, so a 64Gb stick would cover, but it is plenty more expensive than a 16Gb stick, while dual layer BD additional cost is minimal) with some games coming with 2 dual layer BDs such as you listed FF7R and TLO2 so it would be 100Gb and a 128Gb stick is very costly compared to 2 dual layer BDs.

Next gen Sony and MS have a UHD driver so I guess it will be able to read even more layers so possibly a 100Gb game could be in a single disc and would be the standard.

The games for PS5 will be made to use the SSD speed, so you wouldn't be able to use a stick with 10% that speed and only need to install small parts. If you read or watch Sony presentation you'll see that.