Fucking motherfuckers.  Been trying to log in for an hour now to start my gaming Sunday.  Pieces of shit.  Hope they choke on their own tongues. 

Oof. No physical edition of Starfield will have a physical disc

Welp, I guess I'll head to church and try to wash away decades of sin.

Another mark off the meta. 

On the one hand, Starfield is 128 GB, so it would have taken a rather expensive 2 dual-layer 66 GB blu-ray discs or a single 128 GB quad-layer blu-ray disc to fit the whole game on discs anyway. On the other hand, there are gamers out there who are still on sub 10 mbit/s internet, neither fast enough to stream the game while downloading nor download the game quickly. I know someone who games who is still on 1.5 mbit/s DSL and it is the only thing available at his address other than Satellite internet such as Starlink (which costs $600 to install and $120 a month), and on 1.5 mit/s a 128 GB download takes 189 hours at the fastest, longer in reality because you never get your maximum speed the entire time. It's a good thing that Starfield has a pre-install already.

Thank goodness. Sanity prevailed.

I was already holding my tongue about the collector's edition shipping with a code, the physical premium edition for 5 days early access releasing seperately without the actual physical game (literally a physical steelbook upgrade for digital versions of the game). Then after barely a week of good momentum they increase the price of Series X to match PS5 in certain regions (that's an extra $100 in New Zealand), on the same day FFXVI released and disc-PS5 was $60 off at one of our most popular retailers. They already don't list any Xbox sku without a vaporware copy of Horizon 5 or Diablo IV for $900, so an extra $100 would make the entry point for Series X in our country $1000.

If they were to go that hard into pressuring digital ownership by selling absolutely no physical edition of Starfield, while we're still just waiting to see if any of these games will actually deliver on any of their promises already nearing the halfway point of the console-gen, I'd be pretty damn bemused.

At least for now the Horizon 5 and Diablo IV bundles are still listed for $900. If I see that Horizon 5 bundle drop by $50 I might honestly just have to panic buy, because it at least comes with a bunch of DLC and I can pick up the physical copy later for much cheaper.