As Sony doubles down on its plan to end support for physical PlayStation games, game preservation group DoesItPlay finds that about a third of physical PS5 games effectively don't work without a download, and that jumps up to 50% on Xbox Series X.
Ars Technica spoke to DoesItPlay owner and head admin Clemens Itsel, reporting that 27% of the 3,511 physical games tested so far require a download "to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content" not present on the disc.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a useful example. Can you play that game on console without a download? Sure. But should anyone suffer through the disastrous day-one console build of that game? Heck no.
“There is a clear trend that physical releases are increasingly treated with ignorance from larger companies," Itsel argues. "There is no reason physical games would ever die unless someone like Sony deliberately kills them."
DoesItPlay tests physical games using an offline environment and local accounts that have "not been connected to any online services like PlayStation Network, EA Origin, Bethesda.net, Battle.net, etc."
The group's methodology is fairly straightforward. By beating a game's main story (or mode), testing "common stress situations," documenting bugs and missing content, comparing region and edition gaps as well as platform discrepancies, it creates a profile for how offline-friendly a disc is.
It's easy to call out whether a game requires an online connection to function. The necessity of a download gets a little grayer. DoesItPlay has four different ratings for "download required," which can be summarized as:
- No: The whole game is on the "physical medium," disc or cartridge, doesn't have significant bugs requiring patches, and "only insignificant content" requires a download
- No*: the game is content-complete but "has bugs that are either too severe or too many to provide," or is missing minor content accessed via downloads
- Yes*: You can beat this game with "a very high tolerance of bugs or luck to progress past them," or the game is missing "significant side content" like story DLC, new characters, and so on
- Yes: If a "hard-coded prompt for a download" doesn't stop you, game-breaking bugs or essential, download-only content will
Again, let's pick on Cyberpunk 2077. It gets a "yes" for offline friendly, and a big red "yes" for "download required." DoesItPlay explains: "Power of the PS5 masks a few technical issues, but even the PS5 can't completely mask the framerate issues, pop in, and bugs."
Itsel heavily criticizes the way even physical copies of games have been hollowed out.
"Xbox has long given up on producing fully functioning physical releases," he says amid rumors of Microsoft testing a disc-to-digital service. "They far too often require downloads or force players to create a Microsoft account. It's deliberately undermining the value of physical releases by making them incomplete or online-dependent in other ways."
It's not just Xbox, either. Itsel calls the Nintendo Switch 2's game-key cards "a form of deception" for essentially putting redemption keys on a cart, and says the root problem is how companies have been allowed to "relabel a purchase into 'licensing'."
