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There are two reasons.
The first reason, which is probably the biggest reason, is that optical disc drives are much slower than hard drives installed in modern consoles — at least about 10 times slower and maybe even worse than that. The data on the disc *may* (see reason 2) actually be all of the data that is needed to play the game. However, it’s on the disc, probably in a substantially compressed form, and the amount of data that needs to be loaded per second to provide modern graphics and interactivity is more data than can be read from the optical disc in real time. So that data has to be copied to the much faster hard drive, and perhaps decompressed, for you to be able to play the game.
The second reason is that the disc itself might not actually contain all of the data required for the game. It’s not unusual for new consoles to basically just use the disc as a tool to distribute a unique license key that lets the console know you’re authorized to download and play a game. You still have to download it and install it, because the only data on the disc is a small amount of data that proves you have the right to do that.
Reading from an SSD is much faster than from disc. It also has to unpack textures and other features required to run the game. Things that would not fit on a single 50GB blu-ray. Many games are now 100GB+. Gone are the days when the game was essentially installed on the disc and read.
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All of the above answers are correct, it is MUCH faster, when running something, to copy it to the local high speed SSD, or even hard drive, than running off of an optical drive.
But, back in the day, when cartridges were used, they were very fast, because they mapped themselves right into the processor bus.
And for PC’s, from VIC-20, up to the original IBM clones, almost all software that could fit on a floppy did, indeed, just run off the floppy.
I had a few games back in the day on PC that could just be played from the disc.
Freddie Fish, baby!
Same reason you unpack your stuff when moving into a new house: Modern discs have a lot of data compressed very tightly. So back in the day game could read data quickly enogh for what they needed to do straight from the disc, because there was less data to move in general, and less time spent on decompressing it. Now there is more data, partialy because it is better compressed, because decompression doesnt have to be fast, and once decompressed data can be loaded from the ssd very quickly.PCs always have a lot of storage for the era they are used in, so more data (read – more complex/graphically advanced game) can be put on a disc, because it would not need to decompress in real time.
There are two kinds of speed that are relevant here:
Throughput, measured in bits per second: how fast information can be streamed off the disc. A blu-ray can stream enough data for a 4k TV (otherwise they would be useless for watching movies…). That’s comparable to the throughput of a hard disk drive. It’s not as fast as a flash drive but still pretty good.
Seek time, measured in milliseconds: how long it takes to begin reading data from a different spot on the disc. A blu-ray works similar to a vinyl record: there’s an arm that moves inward/outward and can read data etched into the disc. The arm needs to move, then it needs to wait for the right part of the disc to spin around. The seek time doesn’t matter for watching movies or installing software, because the data is being read in order. For playing a game, where the player makes choices that affect what information might be needed next, seek time is crucial. The seek time for a Blu ray is around 100 ms. For a hard drive it’s around 8ms (the discs are smaller and spin faster). For a flash drive, it is basically 0 (no spinning disc).
100ms doesn’t hold much intuitive meaning for most people. Just picture how slow a Blu ray player is to respond whenever you press a button that jumps to a different screen or part of a movie, and imagine injecting that into your gameplay.
For some games, the core gameplay engine loads into memory, then the game loads on area at a time. There’s only a seek when the player transitions into a new area. This strategy stopped working well as games became larger and more detailed (a single area can no longer be held in short-term memory). It also stopped working with the transition to open-world games. Making a game that’s partly read from disc requires extra effort, so once there was market acceptance, no one bothers to make games that way anymore.
Cartridge games have little or no installation because there’s no spinning disc to cripple the seek time. The throughput varies depending on the technology.
You couldn’t just put them in and play them instantly before, but generally had a loading screen with every new area. Resident Evil had a loading screen (the door opening video) between every room and there were games that were much worse. You could go make yourself a sandwich waiting for Galarians to load the next small room.
First, PC discs didn’t always require installation. There were some games that could be run off of disc without an installation, and even when installs were required there were games, back when CD-ROM drives were new, that read most of their data off the optical drive. I remember playing Master of Orion 2 with a 2x speed CD-ROM drive, and avoiding doing anything involving diplomacy or spying because it would take so long to load the relevant animations off of the CD.
Second, not many people seem to be talking about file permissions, installation of drivers, libraries, runtimes, and other related issues that come about when running on PC. On a console the operating system is usually minimal, and is almost entirely focused on gaming. Everything games need to run is already present on a system level. That’s not necessarily the case on a PC. There’s various supporting software that games need to use to run on PCs that aren’t necessarily part of every operating system’s installation. Software that controls how the game interacts with all sorts of different hardware configurations, or allows for the playback of certain media codecs, and all sorts of other stuff that’s either built-into a console, or doesn’t need any system specific configuration when running on console hardware.
When a game wants to run on PC, and be able to save the game / settings, and make sure that the graphics display correctly, and the audio plays back right, and, and, and… installing the game basically registers the game with the operating system and makes sure that everything is present that needs to be. The OS then knows what the game is, and the game knows what state the OS is in, stuff that doesn’t take as much work on a console.
While the speed of hard drives and solid state drives compared to optical media are a big part of why games have an installation process, there’s a lot more reasons besides speed.
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