Sony is getting ready to end production of game discs in 2028, so it seems like physical discs are truly in the rearview mirror. But a recent report shows even buying a physical disc doesn’t give you a great chance of being able to play the game without a download.
That’s according to Does it Play (via Ars Technica), which is an outlet dedicated to testing the physical versions of games to see if you can play them offline or without a download. It has a statistics function on its home page that allows you to scroll through different consoles and check out how offline-friendly they are. As you might expect, Sony and Microsoft’s latest consoles don’t fare too well.
For PS5, Does it Play registers 792 games and states that 66% of them don’t need any sort of download to play the game as intended. 17% are categorised as being beatable but being too buggy or missing central content, while a further 17% need some sort of download to actually play the game.
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Microsoft fares even worse, with the Series X only getting the pass for 50% of tested games. 12% are in the too buggy to play or missing content but technically beatable camp, with 68% needing some sort of download to play. Admittedly, it takes from a smaller pool of games, at just 78 entries. With such a disparity between sample sizes, we have to take this figure with a spoonful of salt, but it’s still indicative of a move away from discs that are playable without any downloads.
The Nintendo Switch 2 beats out both Xbox and PlayStation, with 75% being beatable and content complete (though that’s from a mere 48 entries so far).
The reliance on downloaded software to play physical games is a problem for a few reasons: First, those with small download limits don’t necessarily want to use all of their allocation up when they’ve bought a physical game to bypass that in the first place. Secondly, Xbox servers went down just a few days ago, leaving some unable to play their own games. Third, and most importantly for me, this is a nightmare for game preservation.
In the future, as servers go down, so too do the opportunities to download essential game files. The more games that rely on downloads to complete them, the more preservationists have to work to try and save them.
It’s true that PC gaming hasn’t had mainstream disc support for a long time now, but Sony getting rid of disc trays is quite different. If you want to, as a PC gamer, you can pick up a disc drive, buy a game disc, and play it. Though older discs will pose a problem if they’re not compatible with modern Windows. You often need to run some sort of 32-bit/64-bit installer or compatibility layer on older games. Purchasers of the PS6 won’t have such a luxury. This form of top-down change will inevitably make things much harder for the physical die-hards, and preservationists will have to work a lot harder too.
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