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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board heated up over whether physical game copies are destined to disappear. Posters cited a figure showing that roughly 95% of Capcom’s game sales are now digital downloads, discussed reports that Xbox is considering a new anti-piracy system that assigns serial numbers to discs, and pointed out that the Nintendo Switch’s “Game-Key Card” doesn’t actually contain any game data. Voices welcoming the shift to digital clashed with others worried that once a console generation ends, older titles could become impossible to obtain.
What people said
Ignore him.
These days sales can make digital cheaper than used copies anyway
Sounds like someone who buys the physical copy, beats it in 3 days, and wants to resell it for almost full price
Nobody's buying physical anymore
Whoa
Yeah, no wonder they're killing physical
So who's the other 5%?
Physical copies aren't needed
Nobody's out there demanding Steam release physical copies, after all
Well, nobody puts a disc drive in their PC these days anyway
Steam doesn't have generational hardware changes, but consoles do
It's genuinely scary that once a new generation hits, there might be no way left to buy the old games
The problem with PC is the upfront cost is so high that even with sales and free online play, it's questionable whether it actually pays off
Well, eroge itself is pretty much a dying genre anyway
Funny how the guy saying that is posting it online lol
Only the last person who installed from that disc can actually play with it
It's an anti-piracy measure
Sony will probably follow suit
If they're going to go through that much hassle for such a tiny minority of users
they might as well just scrap physical entirely and pass the savings on to everyone else
How are they even going to manufacture discs once they pull out of Blu-ray production?
Sony can't do that — their discs don't have anything like a serial number built in
PlayStation just disappears from store shelves entirely
and honestly that's nothing but upside
Wait, people still browse games in stores?
I bet they think there's a gaming PC brand called 'Steam' sold at PC shops…
It's funny that the crowd who used to buy physical copies would migrate to Steam, which is completely digital-only
And a PC with PS-equivalent performance costs a decent chunk of change — can the guys who were reselling their used games even afford that?
Some think Kojima getting cut loose by Sony might be connected to the negative comments he made about ending physical releases
A lot of people abroad are rallying to defend Kojima over it
They already started with that half-baked 'Game-Key Card' thing
Nintendo's different from Sony though
They've got tons of titles that sell over a million physical copies domestically every single year
There's no way they're dropping it
Meanwhile Sony hasn't had a title hit a million in years
Feels like they want to go full digital but this is a stopgap born of necessity
That's really the only reason to make something like that
It's funny how many people don't know that
So what's even the benefit of the Game-Key Card?
It's basically a digital download, yet when you switch games you still have to swap the physical card like old-school cartridges — feels like new tech that combined the worst of both worlds
Doesn't it at least save storage space?
The file size should be the same for digital and physical
since you end up installing the data from the card to the console to actually play anyway
Nope, it doesn't
Once installed, the card is only used for authentication
On disc-based consoles like PlayStation it's basically no different
You save a tiny bit, but it's really just rounding error
The Game-Key Card means bigger profits for game companies
If they had to put 100GB of data on an actual ROM cartridge, manufacturing costs would jump by several thousand yen
I get a real sense of obsession from how badly they want to keep physical media alive despite all that
I mean, if it were digital-only, the cost would just be zero to begin with
Wish it would catch on more
Nah, the input lag kills it for me
Microsoft started saying even Premium subscribers only get 30 minutes of cloud gaming a day
Even Takahashi Meijin would be shocked (legendary Famicom player famous for marathon button-mashing sessions)
Yeah, cloud's probably a no-go
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The debate over how games are distributed is rooted in the maturing of digital delivery infrastructure along with rising storage capacity and falling storage prices. While package-free sales models like Steam have become standard on PC, home consoles still rely on compromise solutions like the “Game-Key Card,” and the thread showed plenty of confusion about how it actually works. A Game-Key Card contains no game data at all — it functions more like a license certificate that requires a download on first launch, letting manufacturers hold down production costs while keeping the appearance of a physical product. The worry that older disc-based titles could become hard to find after a hardware generation change is a concern shared by digital downloads too, since those depend on how long distribution servers stay online — so it’s not accurate to call either format definitively “safer.” As for the claim linking Hideo Kojima and Sony, that’s speculation raised within the thread itself, with no supporting evidence presented.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (“Nandemo Jikkyo G”) thread “‘Physical Game Editions Are Getting Discontinued? Give Me a Break!’ — The Truth About Who’s Saying This.”
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