So I understand the concept for movies that are on DVD or Blu-Ray, as the disc spins the encoded data of the image that is on the disc is more or less read by the disc-player and displayed on the screen. But movies are linear and the disc just has to spin with the laser moving in a little every rotation and voila, movie I suppose. But with video games how are all the moving parts of the game, and my inputs and whatnot, read by the system off the back of a disc? Wouldn’t various parts of the code be in differing places on the disc? How does it jump back and forth between disc locations so quickly? How much of the game I’m playing is actually a result of the information on the disc, and how much comes from the part that I have to download whenever I put in a new game’s disc? Is the disc essentially just an installer wizard that allows me to download the actual game?
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Usually information for the current area, characters, items, HUD, etc. is loaded into memory. The console only accesses the disc during loading screens. Some games will load nearby areas “in the background” while you play, to avoid an unpleasant interruption where the player stares at a loading screen.
> Is the disc essentially just an installer wizard
This is often true for modern games. Modern consoles have large hard disk drives that are faster than optical disc drives, so often games will install the entire game’s content to the HDD.
Usually you *can* play the game from the disc without connecting to the Internet or downloading anything. (This is one reason people like discs, they know they’ll still be able to play all their games if a console maker ever goes out of business, or shuts down its online service for an older console.)
However, quite often the developers continue working on the game between the time the game’s submitted for disc manufacturing and release day. (Of course there’s usually many weeks of time between those two events, the discs have to be physically made, and then shipped to stores around the world.) For a game that’s adequately staffed, well managed, and on schedule, they’ll be adding new features, content, etc. during this time.
For a game that’s understaffed, poorly managed, and/or behind schedule, the version on the disc can be a buggy, glitchy, incomplete mess that’s almost unplayable without an update. In such a case, gamers would probably prefer the release is delayed to give the developers sufficient time to create a product of acceptable quality. But creating video games is a business, and the business people will often decide they cannot afford to give the developers that time. In their view, breaking the schedule introduces too many risks and costs. So they stick to the schedule and hope they’ll be able to at least fix the biggest problems by release date.
Multiplayer usually requires everyone to have the same version of the game, and online multiplayer usually requires everyone to have the latest version of the game.
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