I still remember the long ritual of installing World of Warcraft to my parents’ laptop as a young’un, mystified by the sheer number of discs it took to squeeze the game onto a hard drive.
The more discs a game took to install, the better it must be, I figured—child me would be aghast at the contemporary world, where game boxes come with mere codes inside and PlayStation is killing off disc production. That last factoid has triggered commentary all over the industry and beyond, with everyone from Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot and French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon weighing in.
Speaking to IGN, Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser gave his own commentary on the physical vs. digital debate with a multifaceted answer. “I don’t know that I care. If people want that, I think companies should provide it,” he said.
“But I don’t know that I personally care. And I also think the ability to update games, as critical as people are of digital releases, the ability to update and fix problems in games has been really useful for the quality of games.” Notably, both physical and downloadable patches existed before digital distribution became the rule. Magazines like the superlative PC Gamer would even help distribute them!