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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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