This means you can’t pass the game around to your friends or sell it afterwards, which completely ruins the purpose of physical media imo. I mostly play PC these days so this doesn’t affect me, but it’s a disappointing direction for console games. At least they could’ve used an empty disc that has proof of ownership.

EDIT: Bethesda has confirmed that only the PC version won’t include a disc. Physical versions of Xbox will include a disc. Whew.

    • buda@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      They are trying to appeal to collectors but also want to squash selling or trading your game. MS has been trying to do this for 10 years.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    FYI: The Xbox version will still contain a physical disc. It is just the PC versions which will not.

    Not that you should preorder in the first place, but before someone cancels their Xbox preorder over the news, figured some clarification would help.

  • ericflo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m really curious who the target audience for this is. I guess if you have gift cards for Gamestop, although huh, this kind of turns them into a key reseller with extra steps.

    • Arcaneslime@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Mmmmmm my torrents say otherwise. Can’t stop me! Shit like this is why I torrent unless you’ve got tapes or wax for me.

      (This message was brought to you bt Piracy.)

    • nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I never thought I’d write something like this but by pirating it and downloading it on our hard drives, we come closest to what we used to know as ‘own’

  • Anissem@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Some will never experience the wonder of intensively reading the manual of a game on the way home from a store. Discs are becoming as rare as Manuals now.

    • NineSwords@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Or cool nonstandard boxes. But retail hated them so now we get easily stackable standardized game cases and we better be happy about it or else.

  • NineSwords@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Well, isn’t that exactly where Microsoft wanted to go in the first place all those years back when Sony made fun of them in E3?

  • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only reason they didn’t go down the path of serialized discs was the digital market being on the horizon. They were always going to nuke the second hand market.

      • coderade@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        If they’re calling it a physical copy it should be a physical copy of the game data. Having a case to hold a code is a ridiculous slap in the face. And a waste of plastic

  • IntheMesh@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Physical media is dying a slow and painful death. Sad to see really. I’d say to make a fuss, but most people don’t seem to care.

    Honestly, No disc + always online DRM is making me turn to piracy more and more. I want to be able to buy a game and just have a permanent offline copy of it. is that really too much to ask?

    • thoro@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Physical media is dying a slow and painful death.

      Depends on the medium really.

      The Criterion Collection is still kicking so its selected works are still getting highly curated physical releases. Vinyl records are growing in popularity for those enthusiasts.

      It’s video games that have the biggest issue, and it’s saddening because they are the most in need of preservation due to patching, updates, licenses, DRM, etc.

      Wish the big three would come together for some type of preservation goal at the very least.

      • piece@feddit.it
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        1 year ago

        Wish the big three would come together for some type of preservation goal at the very least.

        It’s sad, but I doubt this will happen if it isn’t profitable in some ways. We need an external organization to do this, as it happens with the preservation of every other media (at least I think)

  • Astigma@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The fact the tweet this information came from has since been deleted could mean it’s false info. We’ll see if Godd Howard clarifies in the coming days.

    • Port8080@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Even if it includes a physical disk, it will most probably only have the launcher or a downloader on it.

    • sudo@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      An Ultra-HD dual layer blueray disc can hold nearly 100gb of data. It’s not especially complex to have a game with 2 physical discs that encompass different parts of the game. They’ve been doing it since PS1 (FF7 was 4 iirc).

      • ThreeHalflings@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, but back in the day, a CD cost a lot less than a dollar. Have you looked at the unit cost for a 100gb disc?

        And if it comes with a single-use registration code 80% of the people in this thread would still be pissed off. So, it’s now more expensive, and still deeply flawed.

        • SSUPII@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Because the not use of registration is the whole point? It needs to be optional, how it worked very well for years on PC.

  • innate@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s funny how this is never an issue when people are buying their latest favorite indie game that’s only available to download.

  • impulse@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I honestly don’t get the obsession with physical media. That’s a thing of the past, my PC doesn’t even have a drive anymore.

    The only benefit I see is a reduced download size, but with day one patches sometimes being 40+ GB that’s also not always the case.

    It’s not like you own the game, just because you have a physical copy of it. Once the licensing servers are shut down that disk becomes a paper weight, and that is if it doesn’t require a constant connection to begin with.

    On the other side you could argue that it’s better for the environment if we finally get rid of all disks. Is it a huge impact compared to everything else? Probably not, but it is a step in the right direction.

    • the_vale@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I honestly don’t get the obsession

      Selling the game after you’re done is the biggest one I heard. If you’re playing a single player game that you don’t expect to want to do another run of, you can recoup some of the money. Similarly, some people prefer to buy somebody’s copy for 80% of the price they would pay on the digital version.

      • lightstream@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        “Selling the game after you’re done”

        I don’t think that’s been possible for years, has it? Games had activation codes since long before downloading games became the norm, and I thought that meant you couldn’t resell them?

        • NoTime@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Sure it is, just Google “pre-owned games” and you’ll probably have hits from whatever the main game supplier is in your country (GameStop, GAME etc.).

            • NoTime@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              Ah, hadn’t realised you were on about PC gaming.

              Physical editions for PC gaming for me died a long time ago as I pretty much exclusively use Steam.

              Consoles however I always try and get physical where possible.

      • impulse@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But just you then just buy a worthless piece of plastic nowadays, because the license key was already added to Steam, GoG or whatever?