GTA VI solves a long-standing issue with a bitter pill

Editor's Note: This article was written on June 28th. On July 1st, Sony announced they will end physical disc production in 2028.

The most anticipated game of the decade, Grand Theft Auto VI, has a release date and a price. The title comes out on November 19, costing $80, a ten‑dollar increase that should set the pricing standards for major Triple‑A titles in the coming years.

As expected from a Rockstar game, GTA VI is also full of controversy. The Ultimate Edition, costing $100, received criticism on social media for locking some aesthetic elements considered essential, such as hairstyles and classic cars, behind what amounts to a paywall, supposedly encouraging consumers to buy the more expensive version for the full experience.

The biggest discussion revolves around the game's physical media, more specifically its absence. The version consumers can buy at local stores or major retailers replaces the disc with a download code to be entered to download the game on the console. A rumor that disc boxes would be released in December surfaced the day after the announcement and was debunked by The Hollywood Reporter, where a source stated that, at the moment, there are no plans to release a physical disc for GTA VI.

This is a sign of the times. Just like many other facets of contemporary life, the gaming space has also shifted from the analog market and rental stores to physical disc media, and now from discs to downloads, marking the rise of gaming as a digitized aspect of culture.

The physical media market suffered a decline in the previous generation. Purchases through the consoles' own stores, or through Steam/Epic, created a culture that was once limited to PCs but gained ground over the years as the benefit of convenience became evident. It was no longer necessary to visit one or more stores in your city searching for a coveted title or to wait for shipping delays or online order delivery to receive the game on launch day. All it takes is a credit card, a few details, and any game from the major publishers' library is just a few commands away.

If this option was once seen as a luxury, the pandemic turned it into a necessity. Due to social isolation, shipping delays became common, while an awaited title like Final Fantasy VII Remake or The Last of Us 2, both released in 2020, was merely a button press away.

Convenience gained traction over the past decade and became a habit. Today, the majority of gaming revenue comes from digital sales. Consoles like the PlayStation 5 offer, at a lower cost, the possibility of buying a version without a physical media drive.

All these factors contribute to Take‑Two's decision not to include physical discs in GTA VI's official launch, but there are also considerations of preservation, leaks, and especially control over the product's release. Leaks are common in the industry and become more frequent in the weeks leading up to a release. Shipments can arrive early, and a copy can be diverted by a carrier employee, resulting in leaked screenshots and gameplay footage.

GTA VI faced this issue during development due to cybersecurity problems in 2022. Hackers leaked one of The Last of Us 2's controversial moments, affecting fan expectations. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth had screenshots thrown onto Twitter by someone who obtained a review copy. Final Fantasy XV was available on Latin American marketplaces two weeks before the official launch.

All the cases above were significant in the recent industry, and Take‑Two seems to be choosing to close the "tap" over which they would have control once discs were dispatched for distribution, making the download code the only way to present the final product before it reaches the public.

The choice to preserve the product's integrity by locking it behind a download code is not new or exclusive to Take‑Two, but it feels like a bitter remedy for a historical problem, prescribed by one of the industry's influential names. The decision marks the death of a decades‑old culture. Games have grown in many ways over the decades, and physical media was at the center of it.

In the cartridge era, video rental stores had game catalogs that helped popularize video games among young people and adults in less economically favored countries. In the disc era, we grew accustomed to the concept of lending games to friends or going to their houses with our small CD cases to trade — with piracy involved in countries like Brazil — making it easier for teenagers to access games.

With the PlayStation 3 era and beyond, the culture of piracy was replaced by thousands of adults with jobs who keep gamer culture as essential in the entertainment ecosystem, even standing in lines to buy a highly anticipated title on launch day. Trades still existed, but lending a game to a friend or reselling it became part of the culture and maintained the sense of "ownership" over the purchased product. The CD cases were replaced by shelves full of physical media representing their library of played games and a decoration for their home.

In retrospect, piracy may have served as a double‑edged sword in this story. Many gamers would not have had contact with consoles without pirated games during the 2000s, which helped form adults interested in this entertainment category in the following decades. However, piracy was what pushed publishers and platform holders to justify aggressive DRMs, which pushed the market toward digital and created the trend of purchasing directly on platforms.

Now, through the digital age, the culture around physical media is dying. Game distributors lose what makes the act of going to the store worth the effort. Purchases become concentrated in the same companies through console interfaces. The act of trading or reselling ceases to exist, and the market might see demand for discs as an opportunity — limiting discs to collector's editions. After all, those who consume discs are those who collect or those who choose to have the game on their shelf as a catalog.

By limiting the circulation of discs, they cease to be a necessity and can become a luxury product. The consumer who wants one may need to pay extra (in the case of GTA VI, over $100) to have what, much like inserts or guides in the cartridge era and maps or lore booklets in the disc era, used to come for free with the game you bought at the store.

The "right to own the game" and to resell it becomes a marketable extra, which most consumers will choose to neglect in favor of paying the base price ($80). Just as happened with card games, which became a financial asset with various scalping practices since the start of the decade, the shift in perspective and the market sentiment of scarcity will make the regular consumer in this niche see this product — physical media — as an investment. (Update: with the announcement of the end of physical disc production for PlayStation in 2028, this may not even happen.)

There is another discussion around the topic, relevant to what having a game case with a disc inside on your shelf means: the transition to digital removes from the consumer the certainty that the game is theirs and replaces it with a usage license.

The purchase of digital media follows the principle that you have the right to play GTA VI when you buy it from the digital store or enter the download code, but once that purchase is tied to your account, any issue with it or the game's removal from the console's catalog means it ceases to exist for you. Hideo Kojima's P.T. was removed from the PlayStation Store, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was removed from libraries for years due to licensing and copyright issues.

The Stop Killing Games movement emerged from a similar circumstance. Its demand is to keep online games active even when servers are shut down, with The Crew and Anthem as examples. In a BBC article, Ross Scott, founder of the movement, stated that the concern with GTA VI is not about the absence of discs but about publishers' reputation for preserving access to games for which buyers have paid, and it represents a symptom of a consumer‑hostile practice.

Examples of cases where digital purchases disappear from users' libraries occur in every media category. Despite these, legislation on digital rights is gray and lacks global consensus on what it means to make an online purchase for a product that is not physical. If users feel frustrated with the absence of physical media and the possibility that this becomes the new normal, they should demand more from their countries' laws so that regulations and legislation on digital media purchases are assertive about how much a product belongs to them.

Despite the ethical debates and concerns, Take‑Two's decision may mark the point of no return for physical media, or at least the end of discs as a mass distribution standard and the buy‑and‑resell model of the last generation.

One should not underestimate the influence that one of the industry's most famous franchises, with the most anticipated game of the decade, has on the video game market. Just as prices tend to rise now that Rockstar has confirmed the $80 price point set by Nintendo as the markup, the decision not to include physical discs, combined with cheaper disc‑drive‑free models, may encourage other publishers to follow the same route if they find it profitable, with reduced manufacturing and distribution costs.

It is possible that this cycle will feed itself throughout the rest of the 2020s. The rise in hardware prices pushed console prices up. The average citizen's income is squeezed and encourages buying the cheaper model without a disc drive. The absence of a disc drive means fewer consumers are buying physical media. Less demand for physical media encourages publishers to invest less in this front. (Again, this process was accelerated by Sony's announcement.)

Once it becomes a trend, we will have a transitional era. At its end, digital purchases and download codes become the only way to acquire the standard product, and the disc becomes a luxury limited to collectors willing to pay for the security of owning the game and the scarcity value, or perhaps it ceases to exist as an option.

It is too early to say how this change will affect consumption in the long run, but there is irony in how the consumer, with fewer resources for leisure, is pushed to give up physical media and, in doing so, finances the model that erodes the structure that would give them purchase ownership rights. Despite being imperfect, the disc guaranteed them autonomy over what they bought. Now, to even have the right to run the disc, the player must pay an extra $50; and if they did, they will feel, starting with GTA VI and games released in 2028, that this investment was a waste.

The world is in a skeptical period regarding Big Tech, and the digital environment — purchases included — is weakened when trust in those who hold your data and guard your possessions is shaken. Regulations, fines, and legislation related to social media or artificial intelligence are symptoms of this distrust.

Perhaps it is time to look at publishers and platform holders with the same critical and skeptical tone, demanding regulation that guarantees the right of access to the purchased product, the obligation to provide offline patches when servers are shut down, and some form of digital resale that returns to the consumer the agency that the disc once guaranteed. None of these rights exist with clarity and universality. In their absence, the player pays full price for something that remains, in legal terms, under third‑party custody.