PS5 and Xbox discs increasingly require downloads to function, study finds

Sony’s decision to kill off discs for its future PlayStation titles has proven controversial to say the least. However, how many physical games nowadays can actually be played straight away without first sitting through a download?

A new report from Ars Technica shows recent findings from Does It Play, a long‑running database that tracks physical game releases and rates them based on how playable they are out of the box, giving disc-buyers early warning if a game requires additional downloads to run.

According to Does It Play’s testing, around 73 percent of physical games work fully offline as intended. The remaining 27 percent require a download to fix game‑breaking bugs or to obtain core content missing from the disc. The situation worsens on newer platforms. Only 66 percent of tested PS5 discs work without a download, while the figure drops to 50 percent on the Xbox Series X/S consoles, meaning half of all discs on Microsoft’s system are incomplete without online access.

Does It Play attributes this trend to publishers increasingly treating physical releases as an afterthought. Some discs ship with major bugs that block progression, while others contain only a small portion of the full game and act as little more than a download key. Even when a disc includes a complete build, many modern titles now insert mandatory update prompts that halt progress unless the player connects to the Internet.

KitGuru Says: One could argue that part of the reason so many no longer bother with discs is because, a lot of the time, you still need to sit through a download anyway. Physical media is far less useful in a scenario where publishers have intentionally degraded the experience, which is exactly how things have played out over the course of this current console generation. 

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