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Comment on GTA 6 Price Finally Confirmed, Features a 'Single-Player Experience' at Launch

On the lack of a physical disc, I’m gonna play devils advocate here and just remind some of you that, while it’s fucking stupid these companies are selling boxes with codes in them, as that is absolutely not a physical release, the days of physical media are over.

Blueray discs max out at around 4MB/s write speeds. Meanwhile SSDs can read data at 400-500 MB/s, and NVME Gen 3 alone can do at minimum 1.5 GB/s. The fact is that modern games are just too massive in scale to warrant those slow speeds on disc. Even ignoring the physical constants of Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head, (GTA 6 is guaranteed to be over 100GB) the game is constantly streaming data at rates that those discs just can not feed to the hardware.

I’m personally just sick and tired of people getting up and arms about this, acting like it’s a choice to not bundle games on physical media anymore when there is a genuine physical limitation to this. To clarify I personally believe that these companies and researchers could come up with a newer technology for this. So, it’s not JUST physical limitations. I think Sony and Microsoft, and the various other publishers know that in the long run they save money without having to manufacture physical media, plus digital sales effectively make the used game market extinct. But that takes money and time. We have flash storage that is 30x faster nowadays. It’s not worth it.

Feel free to ignore my rant. Just had to get this out as I’m sick of seeing misinformation spread that they can absolutely get these games on disc. They can’t.

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c64z86@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
I get what you are saying, but games are not streamed from the discs anymore and haven’t since the PS3/Xbox 360 days. They are installed to the SSD which then loads up the game as normal.

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iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Games haven’t streamed from the disc in… I don’t even know how long anymore. The game installs from the disc onto your console for the actual playing.

But the fact that the data is on disc means that I can install it now, or in five years, or in ten years, even after they may have shut down servers or removed it from stores making only the more expensive re release available, etc.

And games have released on multiple discs for decades when necessary.

I can also resell a physical disc. I can let my friend borrow my physical disc. I cannot do those things with a redemption code.

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- UndergroundGoblin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  I am pretty sure that you need an online connections to Rockstars Server to install/activate the installation. Never ever they will let you install/play the Game if you can’t connect to the servers. Otherwise you could, as you already said, duplicate the game. Rockstar will try to prevent this. So what’s the difference between have the Files on a disk, vs. Download it from their servers if they could just flick the switch at any time and prevent you from starting the game.
  
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  - iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    I didn’t say anything about game duplication. If Rockstar requires a phone home to play, then that is also shitty and don’t support that either. But I’m not aware of if they do or not.
    
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    UndergroundGoblin@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    
    I can also resell a physical disc. I can let my friend borrow my physical disc. I can continue to play my physical disc on a new account if mine is banned, corrupted, hacked, whatever. I cannot do those things with a redemption code.
    
    It’s just a guess, but I think they’ll tie the installation to your account, or remove the game from your account if you lend the disc to someone else.
    
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- Graphiar@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I understand what you’re saying, and yes hypothetically they could put the games on multiple discs to transfer over to your hard drive. But ignoring the manufacturing costs, you’re still limited to the read/write speeds of those disc drives. Transferring data from disc to hard drive is a little faster but not by much. Even if the game is at minimum 100GB, and assuming 30GB per disc hypothetically, that’s about 3 discs….it would take literal hours to transfer the game over to the console. Versus most people with decent internet simply downloading it directly, around 2-3 hours hypothetically. Sometimes even less than that if you have 800mb/s internet which is extremely common nowadays.
  
  This wouldn’t be a big deal if the games were smaller in size, as history as shown. But they’re just too damn big now. And quite honestly from a consumer perspective I think the industry has shown nobody wants to go back to owning multiple discs/physical media for a single product. I’m old enough to remember needing multiple floppies to install certain games. I don’t miss that. Not to mention you HAVE to be there to babysit it so when the data finishes copying over, you have to remove the disc, put disc 2 in, etc. I don’t miss that, consumers have shown they don’t miss that.
  
  So I understand the sentiment and I do miss owning physical media. I wish more research would go into developing new technologies so we can bring that back. It’s just not viable with current technology.
  
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  - iamthetot@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Quite a few consumers are showing in response to GTA 6 that they do in fact want a physical disc. Regardless of if they have to babysit its installation. A small tradeoff I am happy to make.
    
    Also, PS5 discs can have up to 100GB on them, not 30. You’re off by a factor of three.
    
    Also, physical disc means no worrying about internets data caps.
    
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    Graphiar@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I wasn’t arguing against physical media itself. Simply having to carry multiple discs for a single game. The MAJORITY of people don’t want that. And even on the subject of there being demand for a physical disc of GTA 6, you really think the flame wars on the internet represent the majority of consumers? History has shown time and time again the internet, or congregated groups like Reddit do not represent the vast majority of consumers. If this was such a huge problem in the industry, people wouldn’t continue to buy digital media, or continue to spend money on microtransactions.
    
    You are correct that they have multi layer discs now to handle those storage constraints and that was my mistake, but the fact is that the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash storage. Modern AAA games are DESIGNED around them because of the large scale. Even hypothetically if you put GTA 6 on a quad layer disc the damn thing wouldn’t run due to having to stream high resolution assets on the fly in real time at sub 100 MB/s speeds.
    
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VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Blueray Discs, which max out at around 30-40GB of data at the top of my head

Single layer BDs are 25GB, but dual-layer BDs are 50GB and released simultaneously in 2006, 2010 introduced triple-layer discs with 100GB capacity, and we’ve had quadruple-layer discs at 125GB since 2018. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a single layer BD, to be honest.

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- Graphiar@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Yes we have quad layer discs but they haven’t sold well, Sony AFAIK is the only manufacturer, and the manufacturing cost is ludicrous. And going back to my previous point, all of that is fucking meaningless when the read/write speeds are abysmal compared to flash memory storage which is required for most modern AAA titles.
  
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  - VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Games haven’t actually been played off of the disc in ages, though. The system typically just uses it for installation to the HDD or SSD and then as a key to allow the user to run the program.
    
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    Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    The install for the 3 games I have on disk for my PS5 takes up less space than the digital versions, and you very much can hear when it’s loading off the disk since the drive is super loud when it’s not just spinning idle.
    
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    Graphiar@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I can’t remember the last time I saw a game do that. I remember during the early 8th gen days they did indeed do that, but from what I recall that practice started to dissolve late that generation. Well after quad layer discs showed up. For standard size blue ray discs like what PS4 uses they’re just not big enough.
    
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