There’s a lot of discussion happening around the value of physical video game discs thanks to Sony announcing it will be discontinuing discs for PlayStation games in 2028. They give people a tangible thing to put on their shelves, help people in places with poor internet speeds play games on day one, and are the beating heart of retro game stores and the centerpoint of community gatherings during events like midnight releases. One wrinkle in the whole discussion around their importance is that these days, more often than not, a lot of big games have a day-one patch, so the game that’s actually on the disc itself is usually not the intended experience.
In a roundtable discussion at the SKY31 Convention Seoul (thanks, Inven Global), several veteran developers like Tekken director Katuhiro Harada, Cyberpunk associate game director Pawel Sasko, and ex-Sony Interactive Entertainment President Shuhei Yoshida talked about console game development. Also on the panel was Too Kyo Games CEO Kazutaka Kodaka, best known for his work on the Danganronpa series and last year’s incredibly underrated The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. Kodaka, known for his candid, often humorous public statements, talked a bit about creating physical editions for games, including special editions with “store-exclusive” bonuses. According to him, a lot of Too Kyo’s Japanese sales come from physical copies, so that remains the company’s “heaviest focus.”
The problem with this, however, is that physical manufacturing requires you to submit a master build of the game much earlier than you would have to for a solely digital launch, as the game needs to be printed onto discs and ostensibly playable regardless of whether the owner is connected to the internet.
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