Hacker News Reader

>a disk inside a cheap plastic box

The loss of everything but the disk really accelerated my acceptance of digital distribution, especially once the disk only contained yesterday's version of the launcher and you had to download everything once you got it home.

The brick and mortar store never had a chance; the publishers removing all impetus to step inside them was the killing blow.

View on HN

Yeah, I don’t get why some people cling to buying physical copies of every game when some of them are literally just outdated clients to pull the latest state from a server

Same here. It's just a disc that is usually already outdated on day 1, and many times, has many bugs that were fixed in said day 1 patch.

With video games there's often good reasons to want the disc so you can roll back to the v1.0 before any changes are made. Rockstar Games always adds easter eggs to the disc version that typically get eroded with updates. At least on the PS4 Sony won't let you pick and choose which updates to install for digital copies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com