Do you still buy discs?

[Kaamos_Llama]

If you go to a store you wont find any PC game discs outside of a flea market, but youll definitely find loads of PS4/5, Switch and Xbox games, in Finland at least. No idea on the split though, and smaller budget games are mostly digital only afaik which explains the numbers.

No doubt its going full digital eventually, its more convenient to users, and Nintendo/MS/Sony dont lose out on second hand sales. There are still a fair amount of people who like to trade in their games for the next on console though, theyll hold out as long as they can.

 

[Colif]

digital is overtaking mainly as all the games are getting too big to fit on a sane amount of Blue Ray discs now. How many discs would 250gb be? Its main reason most storage media is retired, it gets over taken in size. Imagine how many floppies it would be.

 

[Brian Boru]

Imagine how many floppies it would be.

Very roughly 200,000

I thought 13 floppies for Win 3.1 was a pain!

 

[Slasken]

Last physical game I bought was StarCraft 2.

I do have BD-Rom on my PC, but that is because I rip movies/series so I can have it on PLEX. If you have kids, you know the pain of everything being in the wrong cover.

 

[Colif]

 

[Slasken]

I thought 13 floppies for Win 3.1 was a pain!

That was Win 95, I am sure. Win 3.1 only came on 7 disks, including the disk with printer drivers.

 

[Slasken]

People have to much time on their hands.

 

[Colif]

he took a short cut, he didn't actually create all the floppy disks as that would add months just getting the right number that aren't broken.

Then you need working drives.

So software took long enough, hardware make it expensive.

 

[Inspireless Llama]

digital is overtaking mainly as all the games are getting too big to fit on a sane amount of Blue Ray discs now. How many discs would 250gb be? Its main reason most storage media is retired, it gets over taken in size. Imagine how many floppies it would be.

There's an article on PCgamer which makes me think it's the other way arround: games are getting bigger because they don't need to fit on a disc anymore. There's no need to compress games anymore as long as it fits onto a harddrive I suppose.

So basically not bigger games don't fit on disc but games getting bigger because they don't need to fit on a disc.

Oculus VR coder Tom Forsyth, who previously worked on games for the PC, Dreamcast, and Xbox, recalls the crunching required to squeeze games onto discs back in the late '90s and early 2000s. He built utilities to compare compressed and uncompressed textures, to determine which looked acceptable in their compressed state and which had to be left uncompressed. He also hunted down duplicate textures and other unnecessary bits and pieces. While working on StarTopia, Forsyth even invented his own audio compression format to solve a problem with the music—with a week before shipping. Solving these problems, sometimes at the last minute, was necessary, as "you either fit on the disc or you didn't."

The same space-saving efforts happen today (Hanish described more-or-less precisely the same processes), but because an extra 200MB no longer blocks a release, and Steam won't take a bigger cut for a bigger game, there's far less incentive now to set a hard size limit during development. If shaving off a gig means a delay, or means resources can't be allocated to pressing bug fixes and improvements, it probably isn't going to happen.

How game sizes got so huge, and why they'll get even bigger

It's the textures above all, and nothing is going to stop them.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Brian Boru]

That was Win 95, I am sure. Win 3.1 only came on 7 disks, including the disk with printer drivers.

Huh, you could have won money off me there—I would've said it must've been 3.11 then, cos I got Win95 on CD.

But Bing Chat assures me 3.11 was only 8 floppies, AND that
"The original Windows 95 came on **21 1.44MB disks**¹. However, there was also a special Distribution Media Format (DMF) version that used **13 floppies**, which were specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disk²."

So I guess it's the latter I (mis)remember

 

[Colif]

its also cheaper for them to not print all those optical disks so that is another reason its all digital

 

[Slasken]

Huh, you could have won money off me there—I would've said it must've been 3.11 then, cos I got Win95 on CD.

But Bing Chat assures me 3.11 was only 8 floppies, AND that
"The original Windows 95 came on **21 1.44MB disks**¹. However, there was also a special Distribution Media Format (DMF) version that used **13 floppies**, which were specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disk²."

So I guess it's the latter I (mis)remember

It's almost 30 years ago Win 95 was released. I remember having the beta version of it, for about two hours. I really loved DOS, personally, and it took a good while to get into Win 95. Games ran best in Dos as well. Win 98 was the one I got into.

its also cheaper for them to not print all those optical disks so that is another reason its all digital

And then there are the patches, so one can argue that the full game is not on physical media.

 

[Colif]

A lot don't even try. Disk just loads a launcher that you have to use to get actual game. reminds me of Flight Simulator, You get 4gb or something as game but when you launch it downloads rest as you play.

 

[Zloth]

By the way, part of the marketing for the next Final Fantasy 7 game (Rebirth) is that it will require 2 disks on PS5. Apparently, Sony has their Blu Ray discs up to where they can hold about 100GB now.

 

[Brian Boru]

Apparently, Sony has their Blu Ray discs up to where they can hold about 100GB now

Yep, 128gig is the largest these days—altho as far as I know 50gig is still the most widely used 'standard'. Like too much of tech, there are different versions of Blu-ray discs which are incompatible with other Blu-ray discs, all of which may or may not play on any particular Blu-ray player.

 

[1BRAVO9]

The last game I purchased a hard copy of was the BFV, and that was in what 2018?

Its just too convenient to download.

 

[DonovanMelissa]

It's funny, my new, so to speak modern, computer has a compartment for DVD drives. Life seems to feel that I love it

 

[mjs warlord]

If the best game in the world came out on a disc i would not buy it , i have lost count of how many times i got refused a refund for a faulty disc just because i opened the box. I got told because i opened the box i was now the licence holder and licences are not transferable ....... my reply would always be the same ...... why would you want to resell a " faulty " disc.

The only time i got a refund was when i read the " INSIDE THE CASE " instructions of an electronics art space type game , cant remember the full titled but it had a number in it. The instructions said if you DONT turn off your antivirus software you wont get on our servers ..... the manager agreed that was wrong so i got a refund.

 

[Zloth]

I think I only had one game with a bad CD. The store let me exchange it for another copy of the same game.

 

[mjs warlord]

Many years ago i got sim city and the disc was cracked but the shop said how do we know you did not do it.
I sent it to electronic arts and they emailed me to say the disc was not faulty but if i wanted a replacement i could ORDER ( not free ) it from them . I said no so they sent the PERFECT disc back complete with the crack still in it.

 

[Blind Dog]

I would buy disc if it allowed you to play solo. Once you needed internet anyways ,,,

...Dirt 3 was the last physical disc for me.

 

[Inspireless Llama]

I went through my Mobo boxes (I have quite of them for some reason) the other day and couldn't help but notice that every one of them still has a disc with software from them. That's something I acutally never use, I always download them straight from their website, it's just as quick as installing the software followed by needing to download the updates.

So I'm kinda wondering; why do they still include them? Especially people who built their own PC's are advanced enough I suspect they can download the appropriate software.

 

[Brian Boru]

why do they still include them?

I assume for the ~3Bn people who don't have, or haven't used, internet. Some are surely able to build a PC.

 

[Alm]

after what happened this week with Sony (removing digital video content from PSN library) I’m a lot more reluctant to buy digital, not that it would make any difference with whole games not being on discs anymore.