Nintendo Switch 2: The Current State of Physical Releases

Renos44 · 2026-07-26T15:55:42+0100

Xbox one and series discs are particularly weird. Some of them contain the full game as expected but i think thats a rarity now,
Most physical releases are like this

1. Physical license key there is no data on the disc other than game ID and like a basic executable. Entire game must be downloaded and is functionally a game key card.

2. Discs that don't have the actual full release on the disc, Theres actual data on the disc but Its an unplayable or unfinished build that required the rest to be downloaded off the net. Devs actually mark these games as do not launch without an update.

3. Cross gen discs that only have 1 version of the game on disc. Usually its the xbox one version and you have to download the series S/X version. Sometimes its the other way around.

4. Discs that are effectively a day 0 build. Yes the game is there but without a day 1 or future patch its clearly so unfinished and awful nobody would actually like to play it like this, Halo MCC in a nutshell.

DeadSkullzJr · 2026-07-26T16:42:59+0100

subcon959 said:
@DeadSkullzJr It's fairly common for Xbox discs to act as a license only and download the game once inserted. It was around long before game key cards was a thing.

Edit: I should clarify what I mean. If you have a Series X then none of the game is on the disc and will be downloaded. The disc will usually only contain the previous gen version. I'm sure I read somewhere though that the Indiana Jones game was basically just a DRM disc, just like the PS5 version (which annoyingly could've fit on a blu ray).

This isn't entirely right though. Here's a list of games with the native game data on the disc in full, created by an individual. This isn't a complete list of course, and I'm sure a lot has changed since this list too:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/wcjrdt/full_list_of_xbox_series_x_native_discs/

DoesItPlay? also has some statistics to work with. As of current it states that 50% of the games do not require additional downloads of any kind, and work straight out of the box, offline. Meaning they work straight from the disc.
https://www.doesitplay.org/

Checking multiple game entries, each one states that there is game data on the discs. Some games do indeed require additional download data, which I did state some releases were like that. The point is, the discs do have content on them, it's just a matter of how much is on them. Again, 50% are native Xbox Series entries, complete on a disc. Nothing listed on this site mentions anything about the disc being a key only from what I could find. The only aspect that holds true from what you said was the license part. The discs do have verification keys that the system checks against when you pop the disc in. But that's done locally, hence why you can still play many games offline.

Game key cards are truly different from the partial contents on a disc concept. Only a verification key is on the cartridge. They never made a DVD of Blu-ray disc small enough to house only a verification key. So the idea of doing this makes zero sense, unless a proprietary form of the disc standard is made. Even then, that's a waste, and doesn't avoid any of the long term problems that even game key cards will face one day.

subcon959 · 2026-07-26T18:07:20+0100

Doesitplay only tested 78 releases for Series X so the stats aren't particularly useful, but I do think that Playstation is much better than Xbox in this regard. I also think it makes more sense for a cheap disc to be a license than a cartridge so the Nintendo decision still baffles me.

DeadSkullzJr · 2026-07-26T20:23:31+0100

subcon959 said:
Doesitplay only tested 78 releases for Series X so the stats aren't particularly useful, but I do think that Playstation is much better than Xbox in this regard. I also think it makes more sense for a cheap disc to be a license than a cartridge so the Nintendo decision still baffles me.

Chips have way more flexible size options compared to an optical disc, and they don't have to change their form in any aggressive way to achieve what needs to be done. Optical discs have multiple characteristics and standardizations that determine what actually fits on a disc, even the physical size of the disc matters, let alone the amount of physical layers. The problem is, full size discs have been the standard for optical media for decades at this point, not counting the very few instances of systems that utilized mini compact disc and mini DVDs. They haven't gotten any smaller, only larger in capacity. It may be currently cheaper to fabricate optical discs compared to larger chips (wasn't always this way until the artificial intelligence boom), but because of their characteristics, it's way more wasteful using our current optical disc standards for something as minuscule as a verification key, especially when that information is only kilobytes worth of data in many cases. Even using a compact disc would be a waste for this. Chips on the other hand can range at any size you want, and they can come in extremely small form factors. Realistically speaking, chips with very small capacity aren't going to be as expensive as one might think, despite the current hardware crisis. Yes fabrication prices have gone up, as did the sales of the product, but most of the issues are with much larger capacity chips. Given the capacity of regular DVDs and Blu-ray discs, the company would be stupid to spend so much money for the capacities of these mediums, only to use less than 1% of that total storage (you wouldn't really be able to tell the disc even houses any contents at that point, it would look like a blank disc). It's way more sensical to request a chip to be fabricated relative to the size of the verification key data. That's how cartridges are fabricated, or at least, that's how they are supposed to be fabricated (they certainly used to be fabricated in accordance to necessary size).

Nintendo Switch 2: The Current State of Physical Releases

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