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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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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 cracked version circulates eventually.
We as a household have been Xbox a long time (and played GTA1 release day on PS1) but we are likely moving towards PC and GOG model. There’s just too many hoops, and too many greedy costs to continue with Xbox. It’s a sad time.
We want to have control of our devices and media. I want to ensure I have access on my terms. I don’t wanna turn on my interface to see a glorified advertising screen.
We don’t begrudge cost of games. It just get miffed at my rights as a purchaser continually being eroded and treated like I’m the issue for saying that’s not acceptable.
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.
Yes, but by the time GTA6 is no longer available to update it will be irrelevant anyway. You can still update the PS3 version of 5 13 years later.
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"
Yep! I’ve gone back to the glory days of an iPod, but with an old iPhone I use just for local music when I want Bluetooth & modern conveniences. Soooo much better! I have my whole library and then some on it, 128GB iPhone 12 filled with opus music, on an app I built with AI help.
The app is just for myself and can’t be distributed as it uses some API stuff that can’t be posted to the App Store, but it took me about a solid 2 hours of work on Kiro (basically like cursor) to make my own perfect music app.
It works totally offline, scrobbles everything I listen to, and when I have internet again automatically uploads it all to lastfm. Deep listening stats, the works.
I’ve cancelled all of my music subscriptions now and have my own library of all the shit I like. For free! Want more music? Sail the seven seas!
I’m jellyfin but have my library local on a drive. Also gonna grab a newish music player for my car.
You can also buy music directly from artists on Bandcamp Fridays where they still get 100% of the sale going to the artists. I was afraid that would stop when it got sold but it's not dead yet.
Also, another option is to have a locally hosted Jellyfin or Plex (ha) server and stream to yourself. My music collection is over 600GB so there's not many phones that can hold it all.
I also self-host a music scrobbling service with Maloja and Multi-Scrobbler docker containers so I can get similar types of stats as last.fm while also having more privacy. I was able to import my stats from last.fm to it as well.
Hell yeah I never knew that! I’ll do that for sure, I love supporting the artists directly & not having it go into someone else’s grubby hands. Thanks!
Also very interesting on everything being self hosted, might have to look into that myself as my collection is growing rapidly haha
The point of last.fm for me is the recommendations more than the stats themselves, are you able to run a similar recommendation engine based on some musician database or similar?
Yeah unfortunately it does not have the same recommendation engine, just listening stats. I haven't looked for a recommendation engine because I hadn't thought about it. I'll look to see if there's anything like that now.
EDIT: I always forget about ListenBrainz. Not self-hosted, but definitely a good last.fm alternative that includes artist recommendations.
https://listenbrainz.org/
I don't get it, you can have a DRM and online activation on a CD, and a DRM free digital copy.
Also you come about a bit snarky.
It’s not meant to be snarky. I suppose I just get frustrated at those who are willing to move towards a system where you don’t own a thing. I’m good, I can do without but I worry for the next gen tolerating bullshit from corps who have monopolised so much.
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.
Is that still possible with modern games? The last time I bought a physical game it came with a Steam key that locked it to my account. And that was 15 years ago. (Granted, it was Portal 2, so obviously it was on Steam. But I still couldn't give the disc to someone to let them play it.)
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.)
It's important for people who buy/sell games second hand...
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.
Lol, best kind of true :-D