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One thing that I don’t think has been mentioned here is that the PS5 and Xbox Series X can do texture streaming straight off their SSDs, in essence treating the SSDs as very fast texture caches. This can’t be done with the discs. I think with DirectX 12 this should be possible on PCs but I imagine it’s still limited.
The primary reason was it was faster to read data from the hard drive than the disc
This started with the ps4 and Xbox one
But Xbox 360 had the option to download games to the console hard drive and it was also faster.
Now ps5 and Xbox series s and x have very fast solid state drives. No disc media can compete with those speeds.
There are several reasons I’ve already seen others mention. One of the reasons I like to point out is storage space. Discs don’t have unlimited storage; there’s a limit. A PS5 uses Ultra-HD BluRay, which has a maximum storage size of 100 GB. Sure, a lot of games don’t even get close to this limit, but some do go over. What happens when a game is bigger than 100 GB? There are 2 solutions. 1) use another disc, 2) have you download the missing data onto your console.
Devs used to do #1 back in the day of CDs, but they’ve since switched to #2 to allow for seamless gameplay as #1 would have you stop playing to switch discs.
Imagine a disc is an old honda, and loading a game off the disc is like driving somewhere you want to go. That old Honda didn’t go very fast and it took awhile to get wherever you needed to go. Old consoles had to load the game off of the disc, and loading screens were frequent because they were slow like that Honda.
PC’s have always had a storage device where everything is saved (hard drive, solid state drive) think of this storage device as a porche as it is much faster than a disc (old honda). PC gamers wanted to drive their fast porche, but to get to their porche they had to drive their old honda to it first (installing the game).
Consoles now have porches too, in fact computers and consoles now have F1 race cars in them because with new games they have to drive very far (a lot more data to load).
Because developers dont need to conserve storage, they do not need to optimize anything inregard to it, because that is a peasent job, for poor people who cant afford storage, and have a limited amount.
This is, very simplified and insulting, the entire reason.
Because storage does not matter, you can just have a 500 gb game, however, you still not to move it from A to B, with B being your console, and the disc only holding 50 of those gigabytes, so it needs to download the rest, ontop of it, moving 450 gb over the internet is slow, so compressing they compress the files, and the disk files was compressed already, so that 50gb turnss into 100 gb, so only 400 gb needs to be downloaded, and thats compressed to 200 gb, which downloads much faster, but it still has to decompress.
But now the issue is, you have a 500gb game, and nothing on the public markets on an affordable coin, can run all of that at once, so files needs to be placed in logic to the code, so the files know where the chonky textures and and uncompressed 16k raw recording.
2 reasons. Disk are slower. Pretty obvious stuff.
And that disk often come compressed. Got to uncompress it first
CDs and DVDs are much slower than hard drives. You *could* play a game directly from a DVD, but it would pause a lot to load new areas and stuff (even more than they do now.)
PC discs required installation for much the same reason when the game was designed to play from the hard drive. Older games would run directly from very slow floppy discs, but that was because the entire game would fit into memory at once.
Lol, cute… in the olden days we didn’t have Internet. Or at least the GAME makers couldn’t assume the game buyer had internet, or internet fast enough to download a 700 mb game. So they had to distribute it on Floppies or CDs. Now everybody is assumed to have fast internet, and can just install from the internet with a tiny installer app. Now games are massive… many gigabytes, so they wouldn’t even fit on an HD DVD, so they have to come from the internet and stored on huge SSDs or Hard Drives in your machine, or streamed in real time from the internet.
Its faster and more convenient to read data from your device memory than from an optical drive
It makes the game run smoother
Most games are digital and on the cloud to some degrees. New games can install 80% locally, but need the remaining from the cloud and such to sync up. Sad times, but console gaming has gotten away from offline fun. Most stuff requires internet and subscriptions to online services to play
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