This is extremely alarming.
We need to put a stop to future physical media asap.
And on that green environmental note, just imagine how much worse future physical hardware is for the planet...
We need to stop next gen hardware from ever being shipped, manufactured, heck even designed, for the good of us all !!!

I believe that was me. I've done the math before on multiple occasions when someone brought up plastic waste in regards to video games.

Even if every video game disc ever sold worldwide was thrown away, the resulting pile would fit into the average suburban residential lot. Let's say there's been six billion discs sold between the PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, Wii, 360, and XBO. A standard optical disc has a volume of approximately 13.57 cm³, so if you melted them all down and formed them into a solid cube, said cube would be a bit over 43 meters/140 feet per edge. That would fit in my back yard. In the U.S. alone, all the garbage tossed in one year amounts to a cube 805 meters tall. So, even if every game disc ever made over the past 30 years was thrown out, it would amount to less than 0.02% of the U.S.'s annual garbage output. They'd take up just a tiny sliver of a single landfill. If you tossed all the cases, that would take up over 20 times as much space, but that's still nothing compared to the total amount of trash produced from all sources. This is an extreme scenario, obviously, as relatively few physical games are just thrown in the garbage.

The amount of waste produced through the purchase of physical games is vastly overstated. It's a tiny drop in the bucket.

Now if you're talking about plastic consumption, the combined weight of those six billion discs, cases included, would be about 560,000 tons. Again, that's what was used over the course of nearly 30 years. The world produced about 460 million tons of plastic in 2019, and probably around 10 billion tons of the stuff since plastics have been a thing. So, physical video games are again just a tiny drop in the bucket. All entertainment media going full digital won't even a make a dent in global plastic production & consumption.

Going full-digital with our media isn't going to do squat to save the world, and trying to guilt-trip people for wanting to actually own their movies, games, books, albums, etc., is more "blame the consumer" bullshit. Two-thirds of our CO2 emissions in the U.S. are from transportation and electricity generation. We need our power to come from renewables, with nuclear as at least a supplementary stopgap for the next couple of decades. We need total electrification of our mechanical transportation, and beyond just that we really ought to be moving away from our dependence on automobiles (EVs are less bad than gas-powered cars, but they're cars and therefore still very bad) and moving towards a system focused on walking, cycling, and mass transit (note for the reading comprehension-impaired: that doesn't mean "ban all cars"). Our problems with climate weren't created by poor decisions by consumers. They were created by poor government policy, policy influenced by heavy lobbying by fossil fuel and automobile companies. If just the U.S. by itself got 90% of its electricity from nuclear for the past 50 years and we never developed automobile dependency after WW2, we probably wouldn't even be having a conversation about climate change.

I still refuse to give up physical. - When I can't buy physical with consoles is the day I am strictly a 100% PC gamer.

While I don't disagree that vegans are mostly hypocrites, there are vast differences in the type of meat and produce:

I still refuse to give up physical. - When I can't buy physical with consoles is the day I am strictly a 100% PC gamer.

I clicked agree on with this, but I have to state for the record I do not believe Nuclear power is safe or cost-effective. Nuclear waste cannot be stored safely due to the extremely long time that it takes to become safe. Future generations will accidentally or intentionally uncover nuclear waste. Otherwise this entire post is on point. And this may sound really greedy, but if I have to poison people 200 years in the future with nuclear waste or suffer through extreme climate change, then I choose the nuclear waste. Ideally, we should just focus on renewables that are safe like Solar, Wind, and Wave power.