The Game Disc May Be Dying And I Think I’m Okay With It – Zen Of Design

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The Game Disc May Be Dying And I Think I’m Okay With It

July 2, 2026

Damion Schubert

1 Comment

I probably own more than a thousand game CDs, cartridges and floppy disks and yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the last time I physically touched a piece of game media. My gaming nowadays is nearly all downloaded – most frequently through Steam, Gamepass and the iOS store. So my thoughts on the news that Sony is probably ditching the physical disk entirely elicited me a general reaction of ‘well, that was bound to happen.’

Anyway, here are twelve things I think I think about the news – mostly positive, a couple negatives.

Steam is, in my mind, the gold standard of game distribution. Yeah, I know, they’re not perfect, but Steam won because it just works. If I upgrade my whole system, all my PC games are there, ready to go. In most cases, I don’t have to buy a new version for a new machine. Everyone loves Steam. Why they wouldn’t want Xbox and Playstation to hew closer to that is crazy to me.

Gold masters suck, and were increasingly nonsensical. Having to get your game done in August for a Christmas release in November sucks. And increasingly, it just added more disappointment to players because we do NOT currently live in a world where games just work when you put a disk in a drive. Instead, players usually have to download a day one patch – along with any other patches since then.

It will also reduce the cost and increase reliability of making new game systems. I mean, it’s not a coincidence that the difference in price between an XBox with a disc drive and one without is in the range of a hundred bucks. Yes, there’s some markup there, but it also makes the device bigger, adds another point of failure for the device, so on and so forth.

This will make life harder for GameStop. Good, fuck ’em. Some people point out that digital sales make it difficult if not impossible to resell most games, but let me tell you, you’re not going to hear a ton of game devs shedding tears about this. The problem is that Gamestop will sell a used $60 game for $55 and come out significantly ahead since they paid little for it. And none of that revenue goes into the hands of game devs or publishers. By the way, this problem is the reason we went through that stupid phase where the box included special codes for content you had to type in and other incredibly dumb stuff to fight back against gamestop.

The usability of old media is not as good as you remember. I have two boxes of floppy disks and yet not a single floppy drive in my house. The last time I had one and tried to run it on modern machines, the games didn’t work at all. I have a crate full of Gamecube games and a gamecube that has no way to attach to my TV. Yes, these are solvable issues, if I’m willing to invest in connectors and other hardware – and the storage for all that crap. But you know what? The GameCube games I wanted to play I found on the Nintendo store, and the PC games I really wanted to check out showed up on GOG or MyAbandonware. And most of the times I did so, I found that my memories did NOT match reality.

Also, physical media fails. A lot. Nothing like the feeling of saving a game with 8 disks like an old Wing Commander game only to find out disk 3 is bad. That hasn’t happened to me on any game I have on Steam yet.

Games are getting bigger, and requiring installation on the hard drive anyway. There have already been several games that have been released on two blu-ray disks. And for reasons of loading speed and access to necessary data at all times – especially in open world games – most of these games are installed directly to your hard drive ANYWAY. This has been rumored to be a factor in GTA6′ physical edition shipping with a code instead of a disk (at least at launch anyway) but is not confirmed.

I do feel for those trying to preserve digital media, but this move doesn’t eliminate historical preservation, just changes its nature. As mentioned previously, historical preservation has always been tough, especially when you factor in the need to buttress what’s on a CD with necessary patches. But the online component of gaming has always made this hard. Live service games like MMOs are tough to preserve without a server – and thank you to illegal greyshard servers for doing so. Probably tens or hundreds of thousands of mobile games have disappeared after their servers shuttered, to never be playable again. This is something I wish that we, as an industry, were better at, but I really don’t think the path to...