Game on Disc? No Guarantee It’ll Work Forever
▼ Summary
– 27% of tested physical game releases require a download to fix bugs or obtain core content not on the disc.
– The percentage requiring downloads rises to 34% for tested PS5 games and 50% for Xbox Series X games.
– DoesItPlay, a group that tests physical games for full “plug and play” functionality, documents this trend.
– DoesItPlay founder Clemens Itsel says larger companies increasingly treat physical releases with ignorance.
– DoesItPlay grew from a 2019 passion project into a publicly searchable database of thousands of tested titles.
The promise of a physical video game has always been simple: pop in a disc or cartridge, and play. No internet connection required, no server authentication, no waiting for a download to finish before you can start. But that promise is increasingly broken. According to the team at DoesItPlay, a growing number of titles sold as “physical” releases are actually incomplete without a digital patch.
Sony’s recent announcement that it will phase out physical PlayStation game production has reignited appreciation for tangible media. Yet, as the testers at DoesItPlay have documented for years, that physical disc in your hand may not contain the full game. Of the thousands of releases they’ve tested, a full 27 percent require some form of download to fix critical bugs or unlock core content not present on the disc itself. That figure jumps to 34 percent for PS5 titles and an alarming 50 percent for Xbox Series X games.
“There is a clear trend that physical releases are increasingly treated with ignorance from larger companies,” said Clemens Itsel, owner and head admin of DoesItPlay. “There is no reason physical games would ever die unless someone like Sony deliberately kills them.”
DoesItPlay began in 2019 as a small Twitter project by Jon Doyle, founder of boutique publisher Lost in Cult. It quickly grew into a community of dedicated testers. In 2021, the group helped expose the so-called “CBOMB” kill-switch, a design flaw that would render offline PS3 and PS4 consoles nearly useless once their internal CMOS clock batteries died. Sony later patched the issue on PS4, though the PS3 remains unaddressed.
That victory spurred Itsel to “professionalize and grow the project.” From a simple spreadsheet, DoesItPlay has evolved into a searchable database cataloging thousands of titles. Each entry is tested using a strict methodology that measures how much of the core game experience is lost when playing solely from the physical media. The results are clear: a physical box no longer guarantees a complete game.
(Source: Ars Technica)
