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Some early images of the packaging for the PS5 Slim have hit the internet, and a warning at the bottom of the box suggests that you'll have to connect online in order to activate the console's detachable disc drive. That's setting off alarm bells for fans of physical games, who fear a future where the new PS5's disc drive might be little more than a glorified paperweight.
Images of the PS5 Slim Modern Warfare 3 bundle were posted by Charlie Intel on a reader tip earlier this week. Call of Duty fans were principally interested in the '150 GB minimum' mark on the back of the box, but as VGC notes, another warning caught many fans' eyes: "Internet connection required to pair disc drive and PS5 console upon setup."
If you haven't been keeping up with the PS5 Slim details so far, it's essentially a light console redesign that's intended to eventually replace the current hardware. Like the current PS5, it comes in two models: one with a disc drive, and one that's digital-only. The key difference is that the disc is detachable on the new model, and you can buy a new drive if you want to convert a digital-only PS5 Slim into one that can read discs.
On the initial announcement, physical game collectors and preservation enthusiasts weren't quite sure what to make of it. One on hand, making the disc drive optional could signal Sony's intent to eventually do away with physical game releases entirely, nudging disc-collecting holdouts ever closer to the digital-only future. On the other hand, a detachable disc drive could make it far easier to repair a PS5 suffering from failing disc-read capabilities in the decades to come.
Unfortunately, if you have to connect to the internet in order to pair the drive to the console, that makes it far less useful as a future-proofing measure, since there's no guarantee Sony will be willing to keep the authentication servers up and running in perpetuity. If you're the sort to enjoy a console for the duration of a generation and then move onto the next big thing, this won't really matter for you - you'll just have a one-time activation to get the disc drive working and you'll never have to worry about it again. (It's worth noting that the PS5's chief rival, the Xbox Series X, requires a one-time internet connection in order to be used at all.)
But if you've got hopes of popping a PS5 disc into the drive and playing a game 20 years from now, that online pairing requirement gets to be a lot more onerous. Players are already raising their concerns.
it entirely defeats the point of it being physical, and simply turns it into more eWaste like digital only consoles are destined to be.October 25, 2023
This is a bad sign for the ps6 if they move further away from disc.October 25, 2023
Right but that's the concern. Imagine years later if you need to swap a drive and servers are long gone.October 25, 2023
There's a fair amount of debate over exactly why Sony has implemented this restriction. It could be due to licensing fees associated with blu-ray drives, or an effort to cut off third-party manufacturers from making their own replacement drives. In theory, a fully open-ended disc drive connection would make it pretty easy for a boutique manufacturer to create a device that makes it trivial to pirate PS5 games. But taking measures against piracy also means that the optical drive emulators (or ODEs) that have given new life to older PlayStation consoles might not be possible in the future for PS5.
The worst part of it is that we'll never know if the problem is actually that much of an issue until it's too late to do anything about it. By the time anybody really needs to worry about missing servers for a one-time online activation, Sony will almost certainly be out of the business of selling PS5s, and it's not a great idea to rely on any major corporation to care about your ability to use its products decades in the future. I'll just be spending the next few decades crossing my fingers every time I slide a disc into my PS5 drive.
The state of game preservation is such that one YouTuber's wild $20k quest to preserve the Nintendo eShop could show us the only legal way to save game history. Hold the best PS5 games dear while you can, folks.
