Etched in my core memory, from my teenage gaming years, is The Offspring's All I Want:
It's the intro loop from the arcade game Crazy Taxi. The core game and its sequels haven't seen any updates since the 2000s[1], but they epitomized the arcade games of that era: flashy, stupid fun, but maddeningly punishing and designed to eat quarters.
Recently, I wanted to replay the game for nostalgia's sake, only to find it delisted from Steam in 2024 for unspecified reasons. Had I bought it two years ago, I could just boot it on my Steam Deck; now, I'll need to find a DVD drive, rip the ISO off of my Dreamcast copy of the game, and look for an emulator to see whether it can still run.
Now, discs are often cited as a durable format that survives meddling by publishers, but that's a reflection of the era more so than the medium. When Sony announced their plans to end support for physical discs in 18 months, the reflexive resistance feels like pining for an earlier era.
For instance, due to licensing limitations, Crazy Taxi's iconic music was replaced in later PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. They even had to replace real-world brands like KFC with generic alternatives.
Meanwhile, modern games that are shipped on discs often receive large, immediate Day One patches. Gamers sometimes complain that this is a sign of degrading quality in game development, but it takes weeks, sometimes months, to certify a game and press physical discs. Before online patches were commonplace, all development had to finalize with the gold master certification disc, including any missed or deprioritized bugs. Nowadays even single-player games are supported up through launch day and for months afterward.
Publishers have strong incentives to move to digital, beyond the usual accusations of blocking second-hand sales. They have to not only maintain the physical factories that press the discs or produce the cartridges, but also handle the logistics of shipping these boxes worldwide to coordinate launches across multiple territories. Unsanctioned early sales and leaks become real problems; it's likely one of the reasons why GTA6 is shipping physical boxes that only contain download codes to retailers[2].
There are real hardware constraints as well. Games get bigger every year, and some of the biggest games are outgrowing disc capacity. Blu-ray discs hold up to 100GB, and games have gotten so large that they no longer fit; none of the top 25 largest games (by storage size) could ship on a Blu-ray disc. Internal drives are now many times faster than disc drives; in practice, every PS5 and Xbox Series X disc is first copied onto the local solid-state drive, and nothing is really streamed off of the disc anymore.
And of course, almost every other form of media has made the same transition. Movies, shows, and music are streamed. PC games have abandoned physical boxes since the early 2010s, when Steam plus a handful of much smaller online stores took over distribution completely. Sony and Nintendo are not so much the pioneers in moving to digital, as they are the last remaining holdouts.
In fact, the revealed preference of PlayStation gamers is overwhelmingly digital, with less than 15% of games sold on discs.
All that said, there is still real functional loss in ditching physical media. They can be borrowed or sold, and the used games market still exists even with all the above caveats. Preservation is a real concern, and shipping physical discs still lets some games run without online access. My local library started building a collection of Switch games, made available for kids to check out a few weeks at a time: the portable Nintendo console may be the only piece of hardware left that embodies the simplicity of plug-and-play games of a bygone era.
Of course, as I was digging up information about the old game, I find out that they're developing a new one scheduled for release next year. ↩︎
