Sony's recent announcement that it will cease production of physical PlayStation games marks the end of an era for optical discs in gaming. While the author expresses a personal sentiment of loss for physical media in general, they argue that the discs themselves were always a poor fit for the interactive nature of video games, and their departure is not a cause for mourning.
Physical media offers tangible benefits, including the preservation of art, the assurance of personal ownership, and the ability to share, lend, or gift items. These qualities extend to collections of movies on Blu-ray, books, CDs, and vinyl records, which are seen as suitable formats for temporal media with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Optical discs, with their capacity for high-fidelity media and acceptable access times for linear consumption, serve these formats well.
However, the author contends that optical discs—from early CDs to DVDs and Blu-rays—were never ideal for video games. While they facilitated larger game sizes with rich audio and cutscenes, their limitations became apparent. Constant data access from discs was slow, noisy, and unreliable. Scratches or dirt, which might cause a movie to stutter, could render an entire game unplayable. Early PlayStation consoles even required discs to be played upside down to function. The issue of slow access times persisted through the PlayStation 2 and 3 eras, leading developers to implement lengthy disc-to-hard-drive installations that consumed storage space and negated the disc's utility, effectively making it vestigial.
Games, by their nature, are interactive and open-ended, demanding a read-write medium. This is why cartridges, which are faster and more reliable, are considered the superior format for games. Nintendo's historical shift to cartridges for the Nintendo 64, despite its strategic implications, is cited as a move that aligned the company with a more suitable technology for its games, a sentiment that seemingly continues with its current use of silicon-based media.
Despite the obsolescence of optical discs for gaming, the underlying principles of physical ownership and artistic preservation that they represented for a time are still valuable. The end of PlayStation discs signals not the end of physical games, but the end of a particular, and arguably ill-suited, format for them.