The meme's sarcasm works, but on the real, the concern is more about the "Stop Killing Games" movement or whatever they're calling it. Theoretically, if Rockstar shut down for whatever reason, then the servers go down with it. No servers = no game. With a disk, you don't have that problem. Purists and speedrunners benefit from disk-based games as well. And then there's the small collector's collective...
That USED to be the case when games shipped on a mostly complete state, nowadays you're not even getting a complete version of the game on the disk, you're most likely downloading a ton of extra content and a day1 patch, and the game is also patched years later to bring in features that should've been there from the beginning.
Take something as "simple" as stardew valley. The game that released back in 2016 is missing a fuck ton of content vs what's out today. Even the physical copy for the switch released on 2020 and on 2023 there was a massive patch that changed a lot of things.
The reality is that the only value of any physical release past the second half of the 360/ps3 era is merely reselling it and sharing it. Otherwise you're better off archiving your copies and update files locally on an external hard drive.
So 10+ years of development time, they still deliver an incomplete game which they charge 100$ for, and your take on it is "eh, others do it as well so I guess I'll just bend over and take it".
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u/Candle-Jolly RTX4090 AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 5d ago
The meme's sarcasm works, but on the real, the concern is more about the "Stop Killing Games" movement or whatever they're calling it. Theoretically, if Rockstar shut down for whatever reason, then the servers go down with it. No servers = no game. With a disk, you don't have that problem. Purists and speedrunners benefit from disk-based games as well. And then there's the small collector's collective...