![]() But it will also include any physical media that relies on the digital version to work. If Steam disappears tomorrow, most people will lose all their game libraries, since very few people keep digital backups of every game they buy. We have yet to see how this will happen, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility, and the consequences will be substantial. In digital releases, the consumer only owns the title until the distributor ceases its activities or arbitrarily decides to stop posting the download. However, many publishers continue to sell physical copies, and one of the main advantages of having a disc with the game is that no one can pick it up. So it can be argued that there are very few real games on physical media right now. In fact, it seems that development today boils down to just releasing a product, even if it’s unfinished, and fixing it later - Cyberpunk 2077, anyone? Even if a game developer manages to release an error-free game, many (if not most) games still get extensions, cosmetic items, and even new characters after launch. Thanks to the Internet, today’s developers don’t even need to release clean code, because they can fix it by downloading it from the internet. In the golden age of gaming, buying a video game meant getting a complete and finished product that was error-free. However, something like this would never have happened many years ago. ![]() This practice is becoming more common as the size of games grows. To which old-schoolers might exclaim: “Remember, Everquest 2 will be released on 10 CDs?”įrom a purely practical point of view, why offer a fake physical disk if it’s easier for players to download the digital version? Of course, there is a contingent of collectors of physical media, but what about those who want to get a hard copy due to poor Internet access or lack thereof? In any case, EA is likely to see a lot of refunds to people who unknowingly bought or pre-ordered a physical copy, thinking it contained the entire game. Thus, allocating 155 GB on physical media will cost EA much more than just selling the disk on which the game is loaded. To put all this data on a physical medium, you will need six two-layer DVDs or four Blu-ray discs. In other words, this physical copy probably contains only the installer that downloads the digital version from the internet.Ĭonsidering that Survivor weighs a whopping 155 GB, which can’t fit on a single drive, it’s no surprise that EA decided to do it this way. On the box of Jedi: Survivor, it is written in small print: “Download required” (below). Images of the physical version leaked over the weekend show that EA did not include the entire game on disk. The long-awaited Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game is coming out in just a few days, so retailers are starting to get lots. But when does a physical game stop being a physical game? Both forms of media have their advantages and disadvantages, and users actively support them. The distribution environment has grown steadily over the past decade, making its spread inevitable. Hot question: In 2020, digital downloads exceeded sales of physical games for the first time.
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