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With Sony’s recent announcement that it will be ending support for physical games on its consoles, many players are justifiably worried about what this means for the future of game ownership. Others are simply pining for the feel of physical media again.
Seemingly in response to recent events, a Reddit user has created a “game cartridge” setup for Steam. They installed specific games on 2.5-inch external SSDs and then wrote a script to automatically launch them via Steam. All they need to do is plug the SSD into a dock on their desk, and it boots up, a process that frees up space on their main drive and looks quite neat while doing it. The user's post has gained over 17,000 upvotes and almost a thousand comments. "We’ve officially come full circle. Physical media for pc is back, and it looks gorgeous," one comment reads.
While Steam’s popularity helped make PC gaming one of the first segments of the industry to largely ditch physical releases, rival platform Good Old Games pushed back on this future in a recent X post.
Unlike Steam, GOG supports offline installers, which allow users to burn a game to a physical disc and play it without an internet connection. For clarity, many games now use “online” or “live” installers, which hit a server somewhere to grab patches during installation. By contrast, an offline installer is a compressed executable that doesn’t need an internet connection to work — you download the installer once, onto a disc or drive, and then launch it. Basically, offline installers let users truly back up their games, as they aren't dependent on digital storefronts.
GOG can support offline installers because it’s a Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free platform. DRM is used by companies to deter piracy, frequently by requiring a user to create a separate account or connect to the internet.
When it comes to digital storefronts like Steam, PlayStation Network, Nintendo eShop, and Xbox's store, when you purchase a game digitally, you don’t really “own it.” You aren’t buying the game but a license to digitally access it, which can be nullified at the storefront’s discretion. (This usually happens due to expiring contracts or because an old console’s store is taken down.) For instance, Sony recently removed more than 500 films from customers’ PlayStation accounts, including Terminator 2, due to “contract licensing disagreements” with distributor Studio Canal. If you had paid for any of those films, they were in your library one day and gone the next.
These ownership concerns are a major reason why players responded so negatively to Sony’s announcement that it will stop producing physical copies of games starting in January 2028. In response, GitHub devs have flaunted advances in PS5 emulators, as users look for other ways to play games they’ve bought but may not be able to access.
