People keep saying that they want to have the whole game on physical disks -- but I wonder how they'd react to the likes of RDR2 running from optical disks.
You are about to enter Saint Denis. Please insert disk #8. And then you have to wait for the world to pop in because rotational media is inherently slow.
Games used to come on dozens of floppies or few cd's but you could still install them to the hard drive before playing them once hard drives got big enough.
I think that's what people mean about owning physical copies, the ability to install them offline from media you own not necessarily play them from that media.
This would just pave the way to rampant game sharing/loss of sales though. 1 person buys a physical copy of a game and then just loans the install disks to 20 friends who all install it too for free.
Yeh but none of that would work now in the internet age. There is literally nothing short of requiring the disk in the console/PC as DRM that would work.
well dongles do still work and are probably one of the few actual anti piracy methods that does. But yeah the code wheels and such didn't survive the net that's true.