PC gaming entered the digital domain long before any other platform, but my heart has always lied firmly with physical media. Before I joined this team and became a full-fledged PC GamerTM, I was a console gamer—a label I have long blamed on being a child of divorce and finding it far easier to ferry an Xbox between two households than a desktop computer.
And for the most part, my console collection has always consisted of physical copies. Real, tangible discs you can pop in and hear that satisfying little whirr. And a lot of those copies I’ve procured secondhand. Hell, I spent nearly four years of my life working in a secondhand videogame store. The act of trading and repurposing someone’s once-loved game, DVD, or CD is woven into the very fabric of my being.
For a long time, physical media was one of the most accessible, affordable ways to play videogames. Hell, there was literally a time where Sony created a 22-second marketing video mocking Xbox over its attempt to make game sharing more difficult.
I grew up doing swaps with my schoolmates. I have a distinct memory of being freshly 16 and desperately attempting to trade away a portion of my Xbox 360 collection to score a copy of Fable 3—turns out trying to sell something without ID when you’re still in secondary school is an absolute ballache. I could walk into a store and come away with a pre-owned videogame that was half the price of buying it brand new.
But that’s a problem, isn’t it? At least, I reckon that’s a problem as far as Rockstar’s concerned. Its recent preorder announcement for Grand Theft Auto 6 came with a little tidbit that really bummed me out: its so-called physical editions are little more than a box containing a bit of paper with a code on it.
Is Rockstar the first developer to pull this? Of course not. Nintendo has long been using box-with-code as a way to get stuff on store shelves without needing a cartridge to do so. Alan Wake 2 received a fair bit of backlash for going digital-only, but that was in the name of keeping the game’s overall price down to a respectable $60 on console and $50 on PC. And as I said at the start, PC has been almost exclusively digital for years: When was the last time you bought a used PC game at your local EB?
But consoles have remained firmly footed in the physical world, at least until now, and Rockstar has no explanation for the lack of a GTA 6 disc. There’s no deep discount to excuse its decision. And I can’t help but feel like it’s all in the name of some bizarre form on control.
You could say it’s concerned that discs will hit street sale early which could—gasp—leak information ahead of release. But Pearl Abyss literally got around this with Crimson Desert by ensuring disc copies couldn’t unlock until launch day with a download. Is that the best solution? No—I don’t love anything relating to physical media that requires some online component to get it up and running. But it was a workaround nevertheless.
So what is it, then? If I buy a physical copy of Grand Theft Auto 6, why can’t I lend it to my mate, or sell it on for someone else to scoop up secondhand at a more affordable price? It is, quite frankly, a horrifically anti-consumer practice. Rockstar has made an abhorrent amount of money pumping microtransaction after microtransaction into GTA Online over the last 13 years. I’m sure it can afford to lose the odd copy to the secondhand market.
And if a future arises where Sony or Microsoft pack up their servers and jump off the videogame ship, what remains of GTA 6? Will it even be playable in a legitimate way? These kinds of practices aren’t just harmful in the present, they have the very real potential to be harmful in the future, too. PC gamers have extensive experience in just how impermanent games can be when they’re only available digitally.
Rumours have swirled around the possibility of an actual disc version of Grand Theft Auto 6 arriving after launch, though the only evidence to support that is a Reddit post displaying an incredibly vague and confusingly-worded response from a Rockstar customer support employee. I asked Rockstar whether it planned on releasing a disc copy in the future and was given no comment.
Our news writer Andy Chalk emailed Rockstar support himself and received a boilerplate response pointing him towards articles relating to the game’s various editions, a support FAQ, and redeeming GTA+ membership.
Even if it does emerge with a disc-only version later down the line, that feels worse to me somehow. The earliest adopters get shafted by some weird Rockstar semantics. Or even worse, it encourages said early adopters to double-dip just to add a disc version to their collection. Either way, the only party coming out on top here is a multi-billion dollar corporation. And that sucks butt.
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