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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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I’d imagine the games file size would be so large you’d need a full on binder to keep all the discs
Even if it requires a download, a license you can sell or trade is better than one you can't.
Of course, but we’re never going to get there without regulation.
Gotta get that $5 trade-in
NFS most wanted was like 6 cds. Jokes on you I'm into that shit.
But it wasn't too different as a concept: It installed everything on the local drive, then used the first CD exclusively as a DRM. Didn't optimize the install size to leave the useless FMV on the optical media as the earlier PC games were doing
True story: as a kid I had a k6-400 MHz with 20gb HDD. Space was a constraint. I purchased state of emergency, it took 550 mb of space on the HDD AND it required the disc on the drive. I was shocked, what? All my previous games occupied a tenth of that, Virtua cop 2 was like 30mb. And installers usually asked if I wanted minimal or full install. Then I found out that there was a 500 mb intro.bik file. The useless intro video, the one that I would skip every single time was occupying 10x of the actual game and I was forced to have the CD in the drive as a DRM anyway... Why not load it from there?? Anyway, at the time they didn't do file checksum, so I copied rockstar.bik (1mb spinning rockstar logo video) as intro.bik and enjoyed my game.
Then later when playing on a much newer computer with windows 7 it wouldn't install anymore. It wasn't the game itself that was incompatible, but the DRM. Found a no-cd patch on gcw, then the game didn't require to be installed at all! I had copied the old drive on a DVD-r and the game would run very fine directly from the optical disc with ZERO install size....
While I am nostalgic for those days, they were also marred by the ilk of DRM like SecuROM. We discovered my disc drive was literally scratching our discs - the longer we played them, the more they deteriorated until the drive could no longer detect the disc. We purchased a new drive and still had to buy some of our games a second time. Paying twice for the same object was so abhorrent to me as a kid, that if I ever somehow lost access to a digital piece of media I had purchased, I'd just go sailing instead.
You know Bluray disks can hold up to 100GB right?
I'd imagine that the game would still be unplayable with physical media when it likely requires an Internet connection anyway.
They wouldn't release it on floppy disks. It shouldn't need more than a few blurays.
or just three, which is not unheard of