I recently got a deal on Star Wars Outlaws (20 dollars) on Disk and Mario Kart World (80 dollars) on Cartridge if I bought them together.

The disk installation took an hour, there was a 20GB patch included, it asked for the 2nd disk which failed to install as something from the first disk was incomplete I guess. The work around was to wipe the installation and re-download it from the online store - with the disk only providing proof of purchase after the fact.

The Nintendo cartridge worked immediately with no issue.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yeah, the disc is a dongle basically.

ps3/xbox360 was the last time they ran anything off disc. that was 15-20 years ago, yep. an entire generation.

The ones I got ~15 years ago had installers on them. Makes sense, running a game from a DVD drive would probably result in terrible loading times.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the PS3 was that way, even. I'd have to imagine a lot of discs that are already out there would case to work the moment Sony shut down its servers. (And probably similarly so for Microsoft games. Switch seems much better about that, though they do sometimes require a firmware upgrade... unless you hack your Switch of course. And I have no frame of reference for how much that is the case for the Switch 2, but I can't imagine Switch 2 being better than Switch 1 in that regard.)

Also, downloading the game is like 4 times faster than installing from disc.

109% content!