We got the PlayStation 5 reveal last week, and while there were a lot of very cool games to look forward to, people are a bit concerned with the digital-only version of Sony’s new console. Besides being a problem for backward compatibility, some gamers just really like having physical copies of their games either as a way to maintain a backup or just because they prefer to collect physical objects.
Luckily, Sony is still making a disc version of the PS5, but there’s still a problem with it. The industry is moving away from physical media to a model that’s all about the cloud. This means that nobody is investing in making new ways of creating physical data storage that isn’t a solid-state hard drive. Discs are passé, and the currently best available disc doesn’t even have enough space to fit a full game anymore.
The best disc drive money can buy is an Ultra HD Blu-ray, capable of showing movies in beautiful 4K graphics. When used for gaming, a triple-layer Ultra HD Blu-ray can store just 100 GB. While that’s enough for some games, it’s not nearly enough for others. Destiny 2 has already crested the 100 GB threshold and modern AAA games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is already over 200 GB. This means that even if you buy a new physical PS5 game, odds are you’re still going to be using the internet to download a significant portion of that game’s data.
Unless there’s a breakthrough that allows for greater data storage on a Blu-ray disc, there’s just one alternative that will keep physical game copies alive. Back in the days of original PlayStation, larger games would arrive on 2, 3, or sometimes even 4 separate discs. The PlayStation 5 might herald a return to the era of games coming with multiple discs that require owners to swap them in one at a time in order to install.
Or you could just download the game and not have to do anything, and it’ll be cheaper too. You tell me which is the better deal.