[ethbr1]

The bigger difficulty comes from the increasing complexity of games (feature wise) and their release state.

It's effectively impossible to release a "gold version" game to the quality standards of ~1990 physical media, in 2026.

The surface area for potential gameplay bugs is too large: it'd take another decade of QA polish.

So even if you have physical media for the release day version of a game, what can you do with that? Play a buggy version?

To GP's point about post-release physical editions, it makes more sense to sell something later that rolls up the most critical post-release patches and content.

[Maxatar]

This doesn't track with actual game releases, on the contrary it tends to be smaller/simpler games that release exclusively digitally and the big triple A games continue to release physical discs.

As far as bugs go, the solution for this has been and continues to be that after you install the game from the disc, you download a patch to update it. It's been this way for almost 20 years now (XBox 360 and PS3 both launched with explicit support for this).

[tencentshill]

If the game they release on a physical disk is unplayably buggy, do they owe you a refund? Even if online updates make it perfect? They can't require that you play it online unless its not even available physically.