PC gaming entered the digital area lengthy earlier than some other platform, however my coronary heart has at all times lied firmly with bodily media. Before I joined this crew and have become a full-fledged PC GamerTM, I used to be a console gamer—a label I’ve lengthy blamed on being a baby of divorce and discovering it far simpler to ferry an Xbox between two households than a desktop laptop.
And for probably the most half, my console assortment has at all times consisted of bodily copies. Real, tangible discs you may pop in and listen to that satisfying little whirr. And plenty of these copies I’ve procured secondhand. Hell, I spent practically 4 years of my life working in a secondhand videogame retailer. The act of buying and selling and repurposing somebody’s once-loved sport, DVD, or CD is woven into the very material of my being.
For a very long time, bodily media was probably the most accessible, reasonably priced methods to play videogames. Hell, there was actually a time the place Sony created a 22-second marketing video mocking Xbox over its try to make sport sharing harder.
I grew up doing swaps with my schoolmates. I’ve a definite reminiscence of being freshly 16 and desperately making an attempt to commerce away a portion of my Xbox 360 assortment to attain a duplicate of Fable 3—seems attempting to promote one thing with out ID once you’re nonetheless in secondary college is an absolute ballache. I might stroll right into a retailer and are available away with a pre-owned videogame that was half the worth of shopping for it model new.
But that is an issue, is not it? At least, I reckon that is an issue so far as Rockstar’s involved. Its latest preorder announcement for Grand Theft Auto 6 got here with somewhat tidbit that actually bummed me out: its so-called bodily editions are little greater than a field containing a little bit of paper with a code on it.
Is Rockstar the primary developer to drag this? Of course not. Nintendo has lengthy been utilizing box-with-code as a method to get stuff on retailer cabinets with no need a cartridge to take action. Alan Wake 2 received a fair bit of backlash for going digital-only, but that was in the name of keeping the game’s overall price down to a respectable $60 on console and $50 on PC. And as I said at the start, PC has been almost exclusively digital for years: When was the last time you bought a used PC game at your local EB?
But consoles have remained firmly footed in the physical world, at least until now, and Rockstar has no explanation for the lack of a GTA 6 disc. There’s no deep discount to excuse its decision. And I can’t help but feel like it’s all in the name of some bizarre form on control.
You could say it’s concerned that discs will hit street sale early which could—gasp—leak information ahead of release. But Pearl Abyss literally got around this with Crimson Desert by ensuring disc copies couldn’t unlock until launch day with a download. Is that the best solution? No—I don’t love anything relating to physical media that requires some online component to get it up and running. But it was a workaround nevertheless.
So what is it, then? If I buy a physical copy of Grand Theft Auto 6, why can’t I lend it to my mate, or sell it on for someone else to scoop up secondhand at a more affordable price? It is, quite frankly, a horrifically anti-consumer practice. Rockstar has made an abhorrent amount of money pumping microtransaction after microtransaction into GTA Online over the last 13 years. I’m sure it can afford to lose the odd copy to the secondhand market.
And if a future arises where Sony or Microsoft pack up their servers and jump off the videogame ship, what remains of GTA 6? Will it even be playable in a legitimate way? These kinds of practices aren’t just harmful in the present, they have the very real potential to be harmful in the future, too. PC gamers have extensive experience in just how impermanent games can be when they’re only available digitally.
Rumours have swirled around the possibility of an actual disc version of Grand Theft Auto 6 arriving after launch, though the only evidence to support that is a Reddit post displaying an incredibly vague and confusingly-worded response from a Rockstar customer support employee. I asked Rockstar whether it planned on releasing a disc copy in the future and was given no comment.
Our news writer Andy Chalk emailed Rockstar support himself and received a boilerplate response pointing him towards articles relating to the game’s various editions, a support FAQ, and redeeming GTA+ membership.
Even if it does emerge with a disc-only version later down the line, that feels worse to me somehow. The earliest adopters get shafted by some weird Rockstar semantics. Or even worse, it encourages said early adopters to double-dip just to add a disc version to their collection. Either way, the only party coming out on top here is a multi-billion dollar corporation. And that sucks butt.