Topic: Finding time to complain about Physical games and Hard drive sizes.

This is just me rambling for a moment about a pet peeve of me that is really minor when you think about it, but I have decided to talk about it anyway.
So Those of us who buy Physical games do so because, well a variety of reasons, but why i do it is because i am trying to save space on my system's hard drive. This becomes annoying when, even when i buy a game on a disc, the thing still winds up taking a massive amount of space on the hard drive because of updates and DLC. I mean come on, If i buy a game on a disc, shouldn't the game as whole be on the disc? Then again, since we're at the point in the industry's history where games are becoming way more detailed and huge then they likely need to be, given bigger ambitions and dreams that seemed impossible years ago being possible with the power of the hard drive, I'm not surprised.
Still, i can't complain too much. One, Having a game on a disc as an option is better then nothing, and two, i learned over the summer that even when you have an external hard drive to save stuff on, buying retail games digitally can fill up space really quickly. Now, having seen games on disc that, when fully loaded and updated, take up the same amount of space as they would if i bought them digitally, I Suppose it's the kind of situation where you have to pick your poison on the matter.
(I am sorry if general grumbling is frowned upon in these parts, i was just curious what other people's feelings on the matter were.)

@Willax The problem is that you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the SSD if it read off the disc. It’s faster to read off the hard drive to the point that you’d be riddled with pop-in and more if the games read off the disc.

Optical drives are way too slow to run games off them unfortunately. The games will still need to be fully copied to the console’s HDD/SDD and there isn’t really a way around it.
The main advantage of a physical copy these days is that it can be passed on to others (including renting games, lending them to friends or just trading them in).

If games werent installed from the disc onto the harddrive , it would run like sh*t and load times would be like commercial breaks . and there was a time when DLC's were sincere after-thoughts that were added to games for ''extra'' content , but now devs use it as a way to nickel-&-dime people and hold initial on-disc content hostage , so i share your disdain for it.

@nomither6 From the amount of Sims 2 DLC discs I have in a box somewhere, it was a problem long before digital games.

I only buy games physically these days so I can trade them in or pass them on to family and friends to borrow.

It is a bit of an old wives tale at this point that games on disk take up less space then the digital version.

You still have to download updates and stuff in most cases these days. And sometimes there so little data found on disks. Take Far Cry 6 for instance. 68.5 GB file size, only 735.37MB on the disk itself. The rest you have to download, 🤷‍♂️

@nessisonett sure , but it wasn't a huge problem like it is now .

@JohnnyShoulder that the PS5 version?

@Voltan Think it was only on Xbox.

@JohnnyShoulder Apparently that’s how Smart Delivery works for many games.

Games on PS5 and PS4 take up exactly the same amount on the HDD. All the physical copy is is a delivery method for the same data you'd download with a digital copy. The disc is just acting as a DRM check. If you could bypass that, you could remove the disc and play it just fine.

@nessisonett LOL, that reminds me of installing Everquest back in the day. I think I had at least 6 discs to load and more with each expansion.

@Voltan It is, also Far Cry 6 is somewhat of an extreme. Some games at least have some of the game on the disc, although it is a bigger issue on Xbox than it is on PlayStation because only certain games have the Series X version on them rather than all of them. One unfortunate drawback to Smart Delivery. I actually still feel there's a nice advantage having physical copies on PS5 given that they are on UHDs and sometimes install the whole game other than a patch (a legit patch, not just part of the game).

@Matroska Not even close in some instances since the Kraken compression in the PS5 can make games considerably smaller if they have a PS5 version. I wish Xbox put the effort in to have something even remotely close to that since some games/patches can be considerably smaller on the PS5, especially since there's a bigger emphasis on downloading on Xbox for various reasons.

@KilloWertz I think you might have misinterpreted what I'm saying. I'm not saying a game on the PS4 is the same size as the same game on the PS5. I'm saying that in the cases of the PS4 and PS5, all a disc version is is the digital version on a disc instead of on a remote server. In either case, files either get copied to the HDD/SSD from a remote server ("digital" version) or they get copied off a disc. It's the same in each case - the same as if your friend emailed you a file versus putting the file on a disc and giving it to you. By contrast, on the PS3 you could not install a game or only install a bit of the data which'd be smaller than if you'd copied the whole disc across. Same with PC installations back when buying PC game on disc was a thing.

@Matroska Your new post is completely accurate and I'm not looking to argue or anything, but I think it would have been impossible not to take your previous post "Games on PS5 and PS4 take up exactly the same amount on the HDD" as you saying they are the same size.