Looking at the disc-related backlash that seems to be flooding every social media post Sony and their first-party developers are making, I worry that people are fighting the wrong battle.
For Sony, the biggest mistake they've made in killing discs isn't the lost revenue, it's that the decision has snapped many people out of the mental conditioning that has slowly been built up since consoles started selling games digitally. The 360 started with a curated handful of games at around £4. It was low cost, and so the lack of long-term ownership felt low risk. When £8 games appeared, that felt premium for a digital console game. Then it became the norm. Later, £12 games appeared. Eventually full retail games appeared and the price bar rose to £40. £50. £70.
I was thinking about this. I've never bought full retail games digitally, because they've always been available physically at least for anything I wanted. Except for some very low priced things like Arcade Archives, I've also only bought digital when it's on sale because I don't view it as worth full price. Now that digital is going to be the only way to buy those full retail type games, I'll be waiting quite some time to buy them because I won't buy until they're around 50% off, and I will likely only be buying things I am
really sure of and that I
really want, and no longer taking any chances like I do with physical.
I know it's a personal quirk, but I really dislike owning games that I do not like. When I buy something physical that doesn't work out, I sell it. I can't be arsed to sell online so I just sell to a store and thus typically don't get much, but it's not about the money; it's about getting rid of something I do not want to own or have in my possession. With digital, I can't get rid of it. I stupidly bought Panzer Dragoon Remake and a few others that I really did not like at all once I played them, and I absolutely hate that they show up in my library of purchased games and I can't get rid of them. On the consoles, I can hide them at least, but on the PC interface where I actually do most things I can't even do that. So I'm going to be very wary of buying anything digitally that I might not like.
Another personal issue, but my PSN accounts are foreign--not in the region where I live. Technically I'm sure I'm not even supposed to have those, so if I am ever hacked or anything else goes wrong with my account, it's pretty much guaranteed I will be SOL and lose everything. There's enough horror stories online about that happening with people's accounts on PSN anyway, including recently Colin Moriarty.
At each step, there was a pause to allow customers to acclimatise and eventually submit to handing over more and more money in exchange for digital licences with restricted usage rights obscured in the small print of bloated contracts that no one reads. Running alongside that slow, insidious long con was the reassurance that buying a physical copy of a game was still an option. That in itself has increasingly become a long con over the last decade as day-one patches transitioned from something that made a game a laughingstock to something universally expected. In recent years it's become even worse as discs started shipping as little more than an activation key to download the full game. But always there remained that ingrained customer assumption about the long-term security of owning a disc.
Now that's gone, and I half feel like the outrage has ended up playing to Sony's favour by focusing on what we're about to lose instead of what we've already lost. The battle for discs was lost long before Sony announced their end; it was lost years ago when publishers decided that release-now-patch-later was an acceptable strategy on consoles. Even if Sony did continue making discs beyond 2027 (they won't), we'd just be back in this same mess we are now: incomplete games on disc, and no ownership on digital.
I think that this is a complicated topic and one where, as consumers, we don't have access to all the information needed to have a complete picture. I also think it's absolutely worth discussing and thinking about.
There is no question that among western "AAA" developers, a lot of games on PlayStation disc are the equivalent of Nintendo's game key cards, where without a download you can't install or play the game at all. This is ugly, and I'm aware of it by reading and also seeing images of those games' covers that all show some variant of "internet connection required to install" noted on the cover. Because I generally don't have any interest in this type of game, personally I don't own a single game like this and haven't wanted any of the less common ones from the Japanese companies with the issue, like the
Monster Hunter Stories collection that only has one game on disc. I guess I do have one, with the PS4 version of
God Eater 2 Rage Burst which came with a DLC code for
God Eater Resurrection (the remaster of the first game), but that was more of a bonus thing so I don't really fault it too much for that though I would still have preferred it also be on the disc.
With patches it gets murkier. I have a document where I keep track of all my games and the info includes the installed file sizes, version numbers, and whether a game has had a patch at all beyond what's on the disc. For PS4, about 1 in 9 of my games has never had a patch, and on that system I have enough games where I think that's a meaningful anecdotal statistic. I don't have enough for PS5 to feel that means anything and too much of what I have I have not installed yet to check on patches.
But much of the time there aren't any kind of patch notes, or not ones that are detailed enough to know how important some of these patches are. One aspect of the PS5's console interface I really dislike is how patch information is no longer something you can view unlike it was on PS4, so unless the game's website has patch notes there is no customer-accessible documentation at all on what any update does.
I tend to make the assumption that games that get only one or two small size updates shortly after release are likely fixing minor bugs, which I find the most common behavior. Some huge patches may or may not matter all that much to some users--
Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name has a huge patch, because the English dub was added after release. Maybe the patch also fixes relevant bugs, but as far as that dub goes I will never listen to it so whether I have that or not doesn't matter to me.
What is important here, but is something we can't know the answer to is a fundamental question here--how many of these patches happen because companies know they have the option so games are rushed out or minimally tested in a way they would not be if the option did not exist, and how many are things that without patches would still be there and just never get fixed, or quietly fixed in a second pressing that no one would know about other than if someone accidentally discovers it? The first type of patch is the kind to complain about; the second one is a good thing because the games would not get fixed otherwise. I expect a lot of those smaller patches could fall into the latter category but that's speculation and maybe naivety on my part.
I don't have any proof of this but I read various places that the procedure to get Sony to approve a patch isn't trivial and costs the company submitting it money; if correct that is at least some incentive to try to get games in as good as shape as possible before initial release.
Pre-PS3, games that shipped with bugs just didn't get fixed unless the stealth reprint issue happened. A notorious example is the PS2 Soul Calibur III, which can corrupt (or erase? I don't remember the specifics) save files for any other games on the same memory card. This issue exists in, as far as I know, all versions of the game and was also never fixed as far as I know. This was in the day when most games were still released first in Japan and later elsewhere, and I believe this was known publicly about the Japanese version before it was released in the west so could have presumably been fixed for those versions, but was not.
I see this topic being used in dishonest ways by both sides of the digital-vs-physical argument with a too common refrain among the segment of the pro-digital crowd that seem to actively want physical to die who always use the "None of your discs are complete and work without patches anyway!" thing, and the pro-physical side using the
Does It Play website as some kind of hard proof of all the games that don't need patches. While I think it's nice that site exists, I've found it not really all that useful or accurate, because the testing doesn't seem to be in-depth at all, and they don't have any kind of special access to patch notes or anything that the rest of us don't, either.
