Once, video games came with lots of physical goodies, such as guides, maps and manuals.
Those days are mostly gone, but gamers have, up to now, usually been able to rely on one thing they could literally get their hands on – a disc.
But when pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 went live on Thursday, developer Rockstar said customers who opted for the physical edition would get a box that just contained a code for a digital download instead.
It’s not the first time a physical edition has launched this way.
But if the makers of one of the biggest franchises in entertainment history has decided to follow suit, does that mean the disc is dead? And what does that say about game ownership in the digital age?
“My initial reaction was one of confusion and shock,” Ben, a UK-based 24-year-old gamer who covers GTA news on social media under the handle ‘videotech’, told me following the announcement.
In an interview with Variety in February, Strauss Zelnick, the chief executive of Take-Two, Rockstar’s parent company, had said a digital-only launch was “not the plan”.
