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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Physical media has been in trouble for a while now.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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Considering this thing is bound to be a 500GB Clusterfuck with even more gigs of Day 1 patches I don't even know what physical media would look like.
Might as well switch to NFC Cards with the license inside them at this point.
Saw someone else here or another thread about this make a great point: It's not the digital nature of the thing, it's where and who is storing it. Steam used to have a way of backing up installs yourself; if it's still a thing, I have no idea where it's hidden now. GOG is the only place I know that still allows this, with their DRM free installer executables.
I don't necessarily need to buy the games on a disk, but I sure would like the ability to archive them myself in the event the business storing my shit goes under or randomly decides to no longer store my shit. That was my biggest concern with Steam back when it launched (i resisted moving to the platform until the very last hour of WON being shut down and Steam became the ONLY way to play CS), but, again, it used to let you do this hella easily.
Steam used to have a way of backing up installs yourself; if it’s still a thing, I have no idea where it’s hidden now.
Library -> Game context menu -> Manage -> Back up game files...
The game files are just directories you can archive however you want anyway. No stinky 'installer executables' necessary. (:
They're less known, but ZOOM-Platform are DRM free for everything, and given you the offline installers.
I'm sympathetic, I think media that can be borrowed, lent, sold and otherwise transferred is better. But I've given up on video games being that way years ago. I don't have a "collection" of video games any more than I'd have a collection of used chewing gum.
The other side of that coin, though, is that I never pay more than $20 for a game. Almost everything I buy is even under $10. (I think the Orange Box was the last time I paid anything like a retail price for a game. And that was three games.) The games are ephemeral, they could stop working at any moment for any of a million different reasons, and I'd have no recourse. So I'm not going to pay crazy archival prices.
I’d imagine the games file size would be so large you’d need a full on binder to keep all the discs
They wouldn't release it on floppy disks. It shouldn't need more than a few blurays.
Even if it requires a download, a license you can sell or trade is better than one you can't.
Gotta get that $5 trade-in
I’m going to be so happy for the day that I can pay for the hour for a game like this and rent cloud space to store it on.
XboX R-Cade - It'll have an NFC chip reader for card transactions and a slot for bills.
How many games nowadays are available on a physical medium? Why would this be important?
Its a line, some people like to buy and own. Remember this moment when you spend the rest of your life renting your media.
I mean it might just shift to services like GOG. I use Bandcamp for music and don't buy physical CDs anymore because the files are DRM-free and easy to archive. Same with GOG for games I own on it.
Now, Rockstar is definitely not doing a DRM-free release though. Hopefully a cracked version circulates eventually.
We as a household have been Xbox a long time (and played GTA1 release day on PS1) but we are likely moving towards PC and GOG model. There’s just too many hoops, and too many greedy costs to continue with Xbox. It’s a sad time.
We want to have control of our devices and media. I want to ensure I have access on my terms. I don’t wanna turn on my interface to see a glorified advertising screen.
We don’t begrudge cost of games. It just get miffed at my rights as a purchaser continually being eroded and treated like I’m the issue for saying that’s not acceptable.
Not to ridicule your prior decisions, but it's been obvious since at least the xb360 days that gaming on a locked platform (console ecosystem) would always lead to the revocation of ownership and the inability to do what you wish with your own hardware and games (unless you modded them, and I recommend modding your old consoles if you still have them).
There is no future for true game ownership on a locked platform. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft understand this quite well, which is why you are lured in to a walled garden with the cheaper "cost of entry", and have no true exit that lets you keep your stuff as they gouge you further and further.
Since a physical copy would undoubtedly require day one updates to just work properly, you would just end up with an unplayable physical copy If they decide to not make these updates available.
Yes, but by the time GTA6 is no longer available to update it will be irrelevant anyway. You can still update the PS3 version of 5 13 years later.
I don't really care about owning for its own sake, but I know services only get worse for customers over time, so that makes me prefer owning some things.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
Yep! I’ve gone back to the glory days of an iPod, but with an old iPhone I use just for local music when I want Bluetooth & modern conveniences. Soooo much better! I have my whole library and then some on it, 128GB iPhone 12 filled with opus music, on an app I built with AI help.
The app is just for myself and can’t be distributed as it uses some API stuff that can’t be posted to the App Store, but it took me about a solid 2 hours of work on Kiro (basically like cursor) to make my own perfect music app.
It works totally offline, scrobbles everything I listen to, and when I have internet again automatically uploads it all to lastfm. Deep listening stats, the works.
I’ve cancelled all of my music subscriptions now and have my own library of all the shit I like. For free! Want more music? Sail the seven seas!
You can also buy music directly from artists on Bandcamp Fridays where they still get 100% of the sale going to the artists. I was afraid that would stop when it got sold but it's not dead yet.
Also, another option is to have a locally hosted Jellyfin or Plex (ha) server and stream to yourself. My music collection is over 600GB so there's not many phones that can hold it all.
I also self-host a music scrobbling service with Maloja and Multi-Scrobbler docker containers so I can get similar types of stats as last.fm while also having more privacy. I was able to import my stats from last.fm to it as well.
Hell yeah I never knew that! I’ll do that for sure, I love supporting the artists directly & not having it go into someone else’s grubby hands. Thanks!
Also very interesting on everything being self hosted, might have to look into that myself as my collection is growing rapidly haha
The point of last.fm for me is the recommendations more than the stats themselves, are you able to run a similar recommendation engine based on some musician database or similar?
Yeah unfortunately it does not have the same recommendation engine, just listening stats. I haven't looked for a recommendation engine because I hadn't thought about it. I'll look to see if there's anything like that now.
EDIT: I always forget about ListenBrainz. Not self-hosted, but definitely a good last.fm alternative that includes artist recommendations.
I’m jellyfin but have my library local on a drive. Also gonna grab a newish music player for my car.
I don't get it, you can have a DRM and online activation on a CD, and a DRM free digital copy.
Also you come about a bit snarky.
It’s not meant to be snarky. I suppose I just get frustrated at those who are willing to move towards a system where you don’t own a thing. I’m good, I can do without but I worry for the next gen tolerating bullshit from corps who have monopolised so much.
Because I like to actually own the stuff I buy. I don’t want to purchase access to a product for the same price as buying it outright.
I’m also salty every time I see a digital game available for pre-order. Pre-order is to make sure you get one of a limited set of copies. There are unlimited digital copies. The only thing pre-ordering a digital game does is ensure upper management is less stressed about bug fixes and botched releases.
Is that still possible with modern games? The last time I bought a physical game it came with a Steam key that locked it to my account. And that was 15 years ago. (Granted, it was Portal 2, so obviously it was on Steam. But I still couldn't give the disc to someone to let them play it.)
You're not wrong about wanting to actually own the stuff you buy, but your comment is predicated on the false notion that you don't own a game you bought as a digital download. Everybody needs to quit falling for the copyright cartel shysters' lies.
(This is also a reply to the sibling comment by @Cherry@piefed.social, BTW.)
It's important for people who buy/sell games second hand...
Literally all of them because there is no way for a game to exist without physical media. If it's on your SSD/HDD, it's on physical media. If it's in "the cloud" it's in someone else's SSD/HDD. It's always on physical media, just not a nice little disk in a box.
Lol, best kind of true :-D
They’re delaying the physical release for the same reason they’re delaying the PC release. To keep interest high over time and fleece collectors and double dippers. Is it not obvious?
It also has the added benefit of completely avoiding the largest early-leak vector
Okay, let's get down to brass tacks here...
Unless you're paying for some kind of "streaming" video game service, the game lives on your solid state drive/hard drive... which is physical media.
The license is what allows you to re-download and re-install it over and over.
This isn't a death of physical media, because even the streaming video game services are storing the copies of video games they stream to you on hard drives and solid state drives. The physical media doesn't disappear, but rather corporations are using technology to force you to use it how the company wants you to use it, and the bonus to those companies of the increased price of gaming hardware. Now we will have a difficult time owning our own physical media because it has become so costly.
Just because you don't have enough physical media space to install every game you've ever bought doesn't mean they aren't all living on a hard drive or old cd/dvd-rom SOMEWHERE. The "cloud" isn't actually ephemeral. Surprise, it's just a bunch of other people's computers.
Which is what these corporations want, they want to be in full control of who gets access and when, because you're on their property on their hard drives. There is no profit for the game companies in people like us having enough physical media space to keep data forever.
I guess the point is that if you don’t have the disc then they can take it away from you
The way I see it is this has enabled companies to upgrade and rerelease games and keep them operational on newer hardware
I mean, that part I understand, which is why I either download and keep installers if I can (GOG) or I pirate and store installers (usually also GOG copies). Despite being poor, I have that luxury of hard drive space for these installers.
I guess my point is, I do own those files, I am in control of them, they are mine, there is either no DRM to begin with or the DRM has been stripped.
I still consider that to be ownership on physical media that cannot be taken from me. Discs and hard drives both degrade over time, so either way, they must eventually be moved to a new medium of storage, which is always another type of physical media.
I think the conversation around physical media needs to change and people need to be doing a lot more buying from GOG and keeping torrents of those installers alive so we have a "public cloud" of game installers.
But I mean, I don't know how to help people on consoles. That's buying into a closed ecosystem to begin with, it comes with the territory.
It’s not like they can remove At from your library at a future date. You can lose your login. You might wanna sell it and switch to a different platform. The disc is your key to that.
The issue is that someone else holds the key to your license. They can revoke it at any time, with 0 meaningful consequences.
We must now provide our own physical media to store the game...which in principle is fine and makes more sense than a game disk. However, the reliance on corporations to not fuck you over is the issue.
Archiving all your games is easier than said done too. To properly "keep" every game, you'll need a lot of high-capacity storage devices. Going by common file backup strategy, we need to store at least 3 copies, ideally 1 off site somehow. That's going to add up quick.
And hopefully your game is DRM free and doesn't try to phone home looking for a valid license on a deprecated server.
They don’t know that yet, it’s like 4 months away from release
That is what they said 4 months ago as well.
I never played on of the GTA series. But I'm done I can't buy a game w/o a DVD/CD so I can play when I'm on generator.
Also why I have over a 1k dvd movies.
A large number of games on Steam don't have always-online DRM. And Steam has an offline mode too. And, of course, there's GOG and other non-DRM platforms.