That is a contributor yes but you’re going to get large game sizes regardless due to high resolution textures being so prominent nowadays. 4K gaming is what really started all this. A lot of games are still 80GB+ and that’s only going to rise with each generation. Ultimately it’s unavoidable.

That said Activision with COD is a good example of poor compression and unoptimization. Particularly with the stupid ass high bitrate audio that they use and don’t bother to properly compress it.

It’s all fun and games until you find that one specific thing you can’t live without that requires Windows lol. Hence why I typically have a low profile Windows 10 LTSC virtual machine set up on my Linux machines.

What I’ve preached time and time again is that optical discs are a dead technology for AAA titles. Even if you use quad layer discs it would take over an hour to transfer to your consoles hard drive, and they max out at 128GB. Games are only getting bigger and bigger. Plenty of titles surpass that. Most games that do ship on disc are dual layer due to quad layer being rare and expensive. So of course they’re phasing that out.

We really need a successor to optical media but unfortunately I doubt that will happen. However with regulation we could actually go back to owning games and not worry about big corpo delisting at their choosing.

As for used games, well……I don’t think we’ll ever go back to that in a digital format. Unfortunate circumstances all around.

I honestly don’t care. I understand why we moved away from it. My only issue is that we don’t actually own it. It’s a license that can be taken away whenever that company wants. I wish people would stop pushing for physical media when we’ve hit a real limitation there and instead push for regulation to get rid of this god awful licensing bullshit that has plagued the industry for over 10 years now.

Of course, but we’re never going to get there without regulation.

I’m aware. Just not the majority of them. Either way doesn’t personally matter to me as I mostly play single player games, to which Proton is incredible with that.

Still using Windows 10, but after testing out Linux on the side last year I’ve come to the conclusion it’s ready. Other than anti-cheat being in the shitter once Win 10 is officially dropped for good by games I’m moving over to Arch.

No misunderstanding. My point stands that standard blueray discs on PS4/PS5 as an example do not use quad layer discs, and they’re too small to hold 80GB+ AAA media like most games are nowadays.

I completely understand the difference between streaming from disc and transferring to hard storage. Both are true at the same time. I haven’t seen a single, large AAA game transfer from disc to SSD this generation. Ever piece of physical AAA games I’ve owned from 2020 onward has had a code built into the box. I also haven’t seen a game stream from disc since late 7th generation.

If my arguments were all over the place and incoherent I apologize. I’m not good at debates. But to be clear I fully understand the difference.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a game do that. I remember during the early 8th gen days they did indeed do that, but from what I recall that practice started to dissolve late that generation. Well after quad layer discs showed up. For standard size blue ray discs like what PS4 uses they’re just not big enough.

I wasn’t arguing against physical media itself. Simply having to carry multiple discs for a single game. The MAJORITY of people don’t want that. And even on the subject of there being demand for a physical disc of GTA 6, you really think the flame wars on the internet represent the majority of consumers? History has shown time and time again the internet, or congregated groups like Reddit do not represent the vast majority of consumers. If this was such a huge problem in the industry, people wouldn’t continue to buy digital media, or continue to spend money on microtransactions.

You are correct that they have multi layer discs now to handle those storage constraints and that was my mistake, but the fact is that the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash storage. Modern AAA games are DESIGNED around them because of the large scale. Even hypothetically if you put GTA 6 on a quad layer disc the damn thing wouldn’t run due to having to stream high resolution assets on the fly in real time at sub 100 MB/s speeds.

I mean……come on man. You can’t even argue against that. It’s just fact. We need a successor to optical media to accomplish that. We have nothing AFAIK.

Yes we have quad layer discs but they haven’t sold well, Sony AFAIK is the only manufacturer, and the manufacturing cost is ludicrous. And going back to my previous point, all of that is fucking meaningless when the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash memory storage which is required for most modern AAA titles.

I understand what you’re saying, and yes hypothetically they could put the games on multiple discs to transfer over to your hard drive. But ignoring the manufacturing costs, you’re still limited to the read/write speeds of those disc drives. Transferring data from disc to hard drive is a little faster but not by much. Even if the game is at minimum 100GB, and assuming 30GB per disc hypothetically, that’s about 3 discs….it would take literal hours to transfer the game over to the console. Versus most people with decent internet simply downloading it directly, around 2-3 hours hypothetically. Sometimes even less than that if you have 800mb/s internet which is extremely common nowadays.

This wouldn’t be a big deal if the games were smaller in size, as history as shown. But they’re just too damn big now. And quite honestly from a consumer perspective I think the industry has shown nobody wants to go back to owning multiple discs/physical media for a single product. I’m old enough to remember needing multiple floppies to install certain games. I don’t miss that. Not to mention you HAVE to be there to babysit it so when the data finishes copying over, you have to remove the disc, put disc 2 in, etc. I don’t miss that, consumers have shown they don’t miss that.

So I understand the sentiment and I do miss owning physical media. I’m happy there is a movement going on for collecting. I myself have multiple 4k movies and media on disc. I wish more research would go into developing new technologies so we can bring that back. For gaming though, it’s just not viable with current technology.

Edit: Yes quad layer blueray exists but the manufacturing costs for that are ludicrous, they don’t sell well so there’s no insensitive, and regardless you’re limited to the abysmal speeds of optical media drives.

On the lack of a physical disc, I’m gonna play devils advocate here and just remind some of you that, while it’s fucking stupid these companies are selling boxes with codes in them, as that is absolutely not a physical release, the days of physical media are over.

Blueray discs max out at around 4Mbp/s write speeds. Meanwhile SSDs can read data at 400-500 MB/s, and NVME Gen 3 alone can do at minimum 1.5 GB/s. The fact is that modern games are just too massive in scale to warrant those slow speeds on disc. Even ignoring the physical constants of Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head, (GTA 6 is guaranteed to be over 100GB) the game is constantly streaming data at rates that those discs just can not feed to the hardware.

I’m personally just sick and tired of people getting up and arms about this, acting like it’s a choice to not bundle games on physical media anymore when there is a genuine physical limitation to this. To clarify I personally believe that these companies and researchers could come up with a newer technology for this. So, it’s not JUST physical limitations. I think Sony and Microsoft, and the various other publishers know that in the long run they save money without having to manufacture physical media, plus digital sales effectively make the used game market extinct. But that takes money and time to develop new technologies. We have flash storage that is 30x faster nowadays. It’s not worth it.

Feel free to ignore my rant. Just had to get this out as I’m sick of seeing misinformation spread that they can absolutely get these games on disc. They can’t.

Oh yeah and the price is ludicrous….even though 99% of people will be buying on launch. This game is gonna sell like hotcakes.

Tbh not even the fucking Windows drivers work properly either. In all my years of gaming every single time I’ve had an issue with my Nvidia GPU it’s the fucking drivers not working properly. Ranging from wild performance benches in games that only work on one specific driver, but fucks up the rest of my library, to crashes that cause me to force restart.

Once I switched over to AMD with my 580 back in the day, drivers have been absolutely seamless. Fuck that DLSS shit and fuck Nvidia. I just want my $500 GPU to work properly.