Not so for consoles, where the concept of a separate license key was unknown, and your disc/cartridge was both your game data and your license to play it. Paying for a “license” had always been normalized. So when the discs themselves became more trouble then they were worth, there was truly no point in distributing games physically anymore on PC. The game and the license to run it are separate, and once the license to run it is used up, it becomes worthless in most cases.
This was true back in the “good old days” of the 90s/early 2000s, and is doubly true today when services like Steam or EA Origin require you to validate your physical game with a code included in the box via the internet before you can legally install and run it. On PC the disc was always just something that contained the game data, whereas the CD key was what was truly valuable (if you didn’t pirate your games, anyway). Or even more often than that, it’s just a pointless box with a download code.Īlso, on PC, there has always been a distinction between the disc/floppy and the game license itself. More often, your “physical copy” is just a single disc without anything even approaching a complete version 1.0 of the game on it. And that’s sadly one of the better solutions. That picture doesn’t exactly scream “collectible” to me. So by late 7th and early 8th gen, you were getting bullshit like this. To my knowledge, not a single PC game has ever released on Blu Ray, let alone 4K Blu Ray, because the install base for those storage mediums on PC is vanishingly small. I put a Blu Ray drive in my custom built desktop, but I’m probably a rarity. Nowadays, prebuilt PCs and laptops almost never have optical drives of any sort. I remember buying a laptop in 2012 that still had a standard DVD drive. The highest capacity DVDs had only ever held 17GB, and by the late seventh generation it was common to see Xbox 360 games take up multiple discs.īut while consoles seamlessly graduated to the next format (Blu Ray and now 4K Blu Ray), PCs stagnated or even went backwards in terms of external storage.
By the late 2000s, with HD assets and textures causing the size of games to balloon, it was clear that the venerable DVD format was getting long in the tooth. While consoles tend to come standardized (or in at most 2 or 3 variations), PCs come with an infinite variety of components and optical drives. Part of the problem for PC specifically is the storage medium of games. Digital-only was normalized far earlier on PC, something I pray never happens on consoles. It’s kind of odd how the entire collecting scene is so console-focused, but it makes sense when you think about it.
I haven’t bought a physical PC game since probably 2007 or thereabouts.
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