Didn’t Nintendo already start doing this with the switch two?
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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It sucks as I love having physical media, but I hardly pay for physical games. I generally find a better deal for digital than physical (steam summer/winter sales). Last game I got on cart a few months ago was MHR.
It really sucks, but unless someone was to come up with a way to cram massive amounts of a game onto single discs, or no more than two, it was inevitable. That's not why they're doing it, but still
Hey now, I was fine with my 7 disc copy of Wing Commander 4. I'll be good with it again.
They could just use a flash drive to distribute the game. Copy the game to the local drive...and wait, that's how PC gaming works.
The appeal of CDs, or game cartridges, was the ability to load a game and immediately start playing (well after the loading screen as everything loaded into ram) and you could play the game on other consoles (bring game to friend or resell it). To recreate that, most games would have to be shipped on a 256gb ssd so the game can just load from that on any computer. I have a feeling that's not the best business strategy right now
Flash has a limited data retention time. With high capacity QLC flash, that time can be very short.
Yeah, flash certainly wouldn't work for actually running the game, but it would work great for a 1 time distribution/transfer method to the game to a pic/console's drive.
The main reason for wanting a physical copy is so you can sell it when you are done with it. If the data degrades after a couple of years, it doesn't do much good. A pressed disc will last for decades when taken care of.
The technology exists but it's not available to consumers.
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I want to be mad about this, but I own a PS5 with a disc drive and dozens of games, and none of them are physical. I can't run the game off the disc and still need the available storage space to run it (and often doesn't contain a full/completed version of the game), so the disc is just an extra step that gets in the way.
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Makes sense (kinda)