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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media
(www.hollywoodreporter.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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Okay, let's get down to brass tacks here...
Unless you're paying for some kind of "streaming" video game service, the game lives on your solid state drive/hard drive... which is physical media.
The license is what allows you to re-download and re-install it over and over.
This isn't a death of physical media, because even the streaming video game services are storing the copies of video games they stream to you on hard drives and solid state drives. The physical media doesn't disappear, but rather corporations are using technology to force you to use it how the company wants you to use it, and the bonus to those companies of the increased price of gaming hardware. Now we will have a difficult time owning our own physical media because it has become so costly.
Just because you don't have enough physical media space to install every game you've ever bought doesn't mean they aren't all living on a hard drive or old cd/dvd-rom SOMEWHERE. The "cloud" isn't actually ephemeral. Surprise, it's just a bunch of other people's computers.
Which is what these corporations want, they want to be in full control of who gets access and when, because you're on their property on their hard drives. There is no profit for the game companies in people like us having enough physical media space to keep data forever.
It’s not like they can remove At from your library at a future date. You can lose your login. You might wanna sell it and switch to a different platform. The disc is your key to that.