Ah yes, let's compare cell phones and tablets to real a game console. That should be productive. /sarcasm 

I frankly don't understand the furore. Most games these days don't ship with the full playable game or need a major day one patch. If game preservation is the reason, why isn't there an equally large move against Steam and most video game updates? I have Cyberpunk day one on disc - so what? The game is completely unplayable in that state. Game key codes at least are transferable and I don't see how they would stop being supported within 25 years. For the record, I have 3DO and Saturn games that have already rotted rendering my physical media unplayable. I have Amiga originals on floppy discs that have also demagnetised. Hell, my Game Gear is no longer working because of degrading internal parts and requires cap replacement. I think these game key cards are a decent move to improve digital content delivery and don't deserve such outcry.

Another ignoramus who didn't read the thread to find out this is untrue.

I rarely agree with Soundwave, but he is right on this one.  Games are getting bigger and bigger.  Physical is dying and won't be the future.  Things aren't going to get better for physical; they will get worse.  I will be stunned if the ps6 has a disk drive, at best it will be optional.  The ps6 portable will be digital only.    

I'm not saying you are wrong, as much as it pains me to watch physical media of all types dwindle, but the issue with all digital future is two fold...storage and internet speeds.

We are already seeing how expensive built in storage has become and that companies have released recent models with less of it to "keep costs down".  So, as game file sizes and storage costs increase, you are left with having to juggle a handful of games installed on the gaming product.  Deleting and re-downloading games is an inconvenience in of itself, which is exacerbated by the fact that internet is woefully inadequate in a large majority of the world.  As an example, the best I can get is a Verizon 4g lte internet gateway box, and I live in a great county just outside of a thriving part of the state.  It takes an incredibly inconvenient and frustrating amount of time to download updates, let alone to swap games back and forth.  One could say that instead of having games on the console and the need for storage, the devices should stream games...and there we are looking at the issue of internet again.

Until these issues are resolved, it almost could be argued that there is more reason than ever to continue to have physical media.  The issue with mechanical drive consoles is the read speed, right?  Which is one of the reasons they have opted to have consumers install the game to the console, so it can run smoother/faster.  With portable devices, small form factor (and high costs) limits the amount of internal storage.  What solves all that?  Full games on a fast reading small cartridge.  The problem?  Yet again, the cost of the storage media.

The problem to solve then, is the amount of bloat in the games.  Development time/cost and file sizes have gotten to ridiculous levels and it serves noone well.  Bring better optimization amongst other best practices and not only would we not need more and more storage, but perhaps pricing would level off for a while.

I could be way off with the tech side of my logic here.  I don't have the industry knowledge that some in this thread do.  I'm just an everyday consumer that has been gaming since the mid 80's.  I like books that have pages I can turn, movies that I can take off a shelf and put in a hdr player and get an un-compromised experience...and games that I can enjoy the box art, read the back cover (or maybe even a booklet inside!!!) and get the satisfaction of simply popping the game in the console and playing, without all the extra nonsense.

I think it's mostly a matter of principle. Selling you a card/cartridge implies that they're selling you the actual game data. So, when it is actually just a code, no different from a few numbers on a piece of paper, it seems kinda scammy.

Personally, I used to like to buy physical so that I could resell games when I was done with them. For a long time, I took pride in playing lots of games and spending very little money (mostly just Ebay fees) buy buying used games outside of the launch window and reselling within a few months.

Nowadays though, I have systems in different places, my son likes to keep games, and I otherwise just don't care much about reselling. So, digital is more convenient. So, I just don't care about having the game on a piece of plastic anymore.

100% agreed with optimization.  It blows my mind that Rebirth is 150 gb and Expedition 33 is 50 gb...  absolutely crazy to me.  I get Rebirth is a bit bigger in scope, but not 3x.

I think the wild card for physical is DLSS type stuff.  At some point can games have lower resolution textures and just use upscaling?  Same with audio.  Both would make file size way smaller.  

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/neural_texture_compression/

Nvidia has been working on this for a while. 

"The continuous advancement of photorealism in rendering is accompanied by a growth in texture data and, consequently, increasing storage and memory demands. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural compression technique specifically designed for material textures. We unlock two more levels of detail, i.e., 16X more texels, using low bitrate compression, with image quality that is better than advanced image compression techniques, such as AVIF and JPEG XL. At the same time, our method allows on-demand, real-time decompression with random access similar to block texture compression on GPUs, enabling compression on disk and memory. The key idea behind our approach is compressing multiple material textures and their mipmap chains together, and using a small neural network, that is optimized for each material, to decompress them. Finally, we use a custom training implementation to achieve practical compression speeds, whose performance surpasses that of general frameworks, like PyTorch, by an order of magnitude."

Well, there goes my million-dollar idea.  Jokes aside, glad it is being worked on, it will make life way easier if games can get back to 20-30 gb and not 100+ gb.  I do find the anti AI interesting, given gaming is going to be more and more AI drive.  Upscaling, frame gen, textures, voices, etc.    

I don't disagree that Physical is on it's last legs.

But... I am holding out for backwards compatibility and game preservation.

We already have texture compression ratios of 36:1 which beats the Neural texture compression.

The thing with compression is that... The more advanced the technique, the more processing power needed to decompress and "piece back" the dataset.

What will truly be game changing is Neural Texture Generation... You simply won't have texture files anymore, you will simply have a description of what that texture pattern is... And the Neural processing takes care of the rest, procedural generating it on-demand.
We already have procedural texture generation, but it's still fairly rudimentary and limited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_texture