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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Did any of that R* union busting controversy get resolved?
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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Wasn't Half life 2 digital release only in 2004? I remember being pissed off I had to create a steam account and that is why my account name is rather rude.
Why do people think that gta6 content will be stored locally?
So it's gonna be a live service (online only) and die one day just like The Crew did?
Do games even fully come on disc anymore?
Not tryna be a dick but like, haven't touched a modern console in a bit cuz PC.
Don't all new games need like a giant day 1 patch to work anyways now?
Grand Theft Game there. What a fucking joke.
It's at least the last nail in the coffin for consoles. The whole point of a console is that you can put the game in and it just works.
No, the whole point of consoles is that you can just play a game and it just works. Physical has been dead for generations.
Considering this thing is bound to be a 500GB Clusterfuck with even more gigs of Day 1 patches I don't even know what physical media would look like.
Might as well switch to NFC Cards with the license inside them at this point.
thumb drive? Should easily fit into a case
The physical media should be a 500GB M.2 SSD containing the game. Plug and play haha
A disc with a licence on it is better than a single use download code.
I hesitate to ask but you know Nintendo already did that yeah? Like it sounds like you may know but just to make sure.
At least did more honestly (clearly put a "DO NOT PURCHASE" label on the box) than a fake 50mb stub that just tells the user "there's a 200gb update to download, you need to go online and download it" that too many games are doing nowadays and there's no way to know if the game is actually included or the purpose of the disc is to be a DRM
Oh for sure, it's a real weird time for the industry in that way. I'm not a fan, but I guess when the world ends the 360 will reign supreme?
Saw someone else here or another thread about this make a great point: It's not the digital nature of the thing, it's where and who is storing it. Steam used to have a way of backing up installs yourself; if it's still a thing, I have no idea where it's hidden now. GOG is the only place I know that still allows this, with their DRM free installer executables.
I don't necessarily need to buy the games on a disk, but I sure would like the ability to archive them myself in the event the business storing my shit goes under or randomly decides to no longer store my shit. That was my biggest concern with Steam back when it launched (i resisted moving to the platform until the very last hour of WON being shut down and Steam became the ONLY way to play CS), but, again, it used to let you do this hella easily.
Steam used to have a way of backing up installs yourself; if it’s still a thing, I have no idea where it’s hidden now.
Library -> Game context menu -> Manage -> Back up game files...
The game files are just directories you can archive however you want anyway. No stinky 'installer executables' necessary. (:
You can back up your Xbox digital games at least via transferring them to an external drive. Not sure about PS, they’re always more restrictive.
They're less known, but ZOOM-Platform are DRM free for everything, and given you the offline installers.
Physical media has been in trouble for a while now.
I’d imagine the games file size would be so large you’d need a full on binder to keep all the discs
I'd imagine that the game would still be unplayable with physical media when it likely requires an Internet connection anyway.
NFS most wanted was like 6 cds. Jokes on you I'm into that shit.
But it wasn't too different as a concept: It installed everything on the local drive, then used the first CD exclusively as a DRM. Didn't optimize the install size to leave the useless FMV on the optical media as the earlier PC games were doing
True story: as a kid I had a k6-400 MHz with 20gb HDD. Space was a constraint. I purchased state of emergency, it took 550 mb of space on the HDD AND it required the disc on the drive. I was shocked, what? All my previous games occupied a tenth of that, Virtua cop 2 was like 30mb. And installers usually asked if I wanted minimal or full install. Then I found out that there was a 500 mb intro.bik file. The useless intro video, the one that I would skip every single time was occupying 10x of the actual game and I was forced to have the CD in the drive as a DRM anyway... Why not load it from there?? Anyway, at the time they didn't do file checksum, so I copied rockstar.bik (1mb spinning rockstar logo video) as intro.bik and enjoyed my game.
Then later when playing on a much newer computer with windows 7 it wouldn't install anymore. It wasn't the game itself that was incompatible, but the DRM. Found a no-cd patch on gcw, then the game didn't require to be installed at all! I had copied the old drive on a DVD-r and the game would run very fine directly from the optical disc with ZERO install size....
Even if it requires a download, a license you can sell or trade is better than one you can't.
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Physical media was already a car crash victim lol. Physical sales are like 10% of all console game sales. To make the top 10 physical sales charts in the UK and US a game barely has to hit 4 figures in sales.
How many games nowadays are available on a physical medium? Why would this be important?
Its a line, some people like to buy and own. Remember this moment when you spend the rest of your life renting your media.
I mean it might just shift to services like GOG. I use Bandcamp for music and don't buy physical CDs anymore because the files are DRM-free and easy to archive. Same with GOG for games I own on it.
Now, Rockstar is definitely not doing a DRM-free release though. Hopefully a crackes version circulates eventually.
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I don't really care about owning for its own sake, but I know services only get worse for customers over time, so that makes me prefer owning some things.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
Since a physical copy would undoubtedly require day one updates to just work properly, you would just end up with an unplayable physical copy If they decide to not make these updates available.
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Because I like to actually own the stuff I buy. I don’t want to purchase access to a product for the same price as buying it outright.
I’m also salty every time I see a digital game available for pre-order. Pre-order is to make sure you get one of a limited set of copies. There are unlimited digital copies. The only thing pre-ordering a digital game does is ensure upper management is less stressed about bug fixes and botched releases.
You're not wrong about wanting to actually own the stuff you buy, but your comment is predicated on the false notion that you don't own a game you bought as a digital download. Everybody needs to quit falling for the copyright cartel shysters' lies.
(This is also a reply to the sibling comment by @Cherry@piefed.social, BTW.)
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It's important for people who buy/sell games second hand...
Also it can be nice to find an old game you bought 20 years ago in a closet with your old console and have some chance to be able to just boot it up and play it without needing the servers to still be up and running...
Literally all of them because there is no way for a game to exist without physical media. If it's on your SSD/HDD, it's on physical media. If it's in "the cloud" it's in someone else's SSD/HDD. It's always on physical media, just not a nice little disk in a box.
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I'm sympathetic, I think media that can be borrowed, lent, sold and otherwise transferred is better. But I've given up on video games being that way years ago. I don't have a "collection" of video games any more than I'd have a collection of used chewing gum.
The other side of that coin, though, is that I never pay more than $20 for a game. Almost everything I buy is even under $10. (I think the Orange Box was the last time I paid anything like a retail price for a game. And that was three games.) The games are ephemeral, they could stop working at any moment for any of a million different reasons, and I'd have no recourse. So I'm not going to pay crazy archival prices.
Digital media is dead. It's not like you can fit the whole game on the disc anymore. The next best thing is to get DRM free digital games that you truly own.
I’m going to be so happy for the day that I can pay for the hour for a game like this and rent cloud space to store it on.
XboX R-Cade - It'll have an NFC chip reader for card transactions and a slot for bills.
They’re delaying the physical release for the same reason they’re delaying the PC release. To keep interest high over time and fleece collectors and double dippers. Is it not obvious?
It also has the added benefit of completely avoiding the largest early-leak vector
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