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This was brought on by the Sony news that all disk based distribution will stop.

At what point do I have be concerned that a cart or disk I buy won’t work on my system without a mandatory download?

The ps3 seem pretty clear but I seem to recall a game or two that did require a download, or system update, to play.

How many ps4/ps5 games would I be able to play without a server connection?

What about switch 1 /2 games?

Is there a website that tracks this or a way to tell?

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[-] MoogMuskie@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Hogwarts Legacy is one example. It only contains a very small portion of the game on cartridge (The tutorial area). The rest you have to download.

There were lots of other games that did this, I've seen plenty of games like this on store shelves, but I just can't recall any more specific examples at the top of my head, since I usually just mentally ignored the existence of any Switch games when they weren't released properly on cart.

More often then not, download-required games were just a download code with no cart, but there are quite a handful of games that released as a cartridge that basically acted like a key. I don't know if they differed at all in functionality to the Switch 2's key cards because I never bought one to test, but I believe it seems to work practically identically to the Switch 2's Game-key cards.

this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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