Pre-orders for GTA 6 go live tomorrow, and Rockstar has now revealed a lot more about what you’ll be able to pre-order. Alongside detailing the Ultimate Edition and a pre-order bonus pack of exclusive content, they’ve also confirmed something about the physical edition: it won’t be a disc.
That’s right, Grand Theft Auto VI physical copies that you can find in your high street and online retailers will have a digital download code in the box and will not include a disc.
The one upside to this is that both physical and digital pre-orders will be able to start pre-loading the game from 12th November ahead of the 19th November launch.
GTA 6 will almost certainly be far bigger than the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a disc these days, and Rockstar will almost certainly be working right up to the deadline to deliver a day one patch. Because of this, it’s quite unlikely that they would have shipped a playable version of the game on disc anyway – perhaps they would have followed a common Xbox practice of simply having a placeholder file on the disc to act as authentication for the full game download, since games need to be installed to internal SSDs these days anyway.
But this still sucks for consumers. Yes, there’s been a massive shift away from physical to digital media over the past 15 years, spurred on by convenience, always online games and other gaming trends, but there is still a decent proportion of gamers who like to buy things physically to have a sense of ownership, and to be able to trade in their game to subsidise their hobby.
When GTA 6 is expected to set a new high water mark for the starting price of a game release as well – the leaks over the weekend suggested a €90 price for the standard edition – this puts more pressure on gamers’ wallets.
Source: press release
