This week, Rob Fahey assesses the implications of the physical versions of Grand Theft Auto VI shipping without a disc. The subject of physical media, and more pointedly its impending demise, is a key one following Sony's announcement that no new PlayStation games will ship on disc beyond January 2028.

Then we speak to an Eve Online player of 20 years about the importance of player interaction and politics for building community within live-service games.

Finally: Social Commentary, Extra, This Month In Edge, and possibly a moment to dig out and sniff some vintage game manuals from the early '90s. 

It's not hyperbole to say that GTAVI will be the biggest videogame launch of this decade. It's probably not even hyperbole to say that it will be the biggest entertainment launch of any kind in this decade, in terms of raw sales figures if not broad cultural impact.

A commercial event of this scale ends up wielding an influence that goes far beyond the fortunes of its publisher. We've already seen how other major releases are tripping over each other in their haste to evacuate the weeks around GTA's launch date. Its performance will also become a bellwether for the entire industry; if GTA stumbles and misses its sky-high projections in any way, it will likely trigger a slump in investment and funding across the board.

For better or worse, GTA will also set trends for years to come. Its pricing – $80 for the standard edition, $100 for the 'ultimate' edition – will be raised as an argument for higher price points in many boardrooms. Last week, it transpired that Rockstar has made another decision that will set a trend for the rest of the industry: GTAVI will be a download-only game, totally eschewing any physical media release at its launch.

Physical-schmizical

The game will have physical boxes to be sold at retail – presumably something of a sop to major retailers that would otherwise be completely cut out of the launch – but these units will only contain a download code for PlayStation or Xbox stores. 

It's more accurate to say that Rockstar is out in front of a trend here, rather than setting it directly, since the writing has been on the wall for physical media for some time. It's always seemed likely that this generation of consoles would be the last to sport disc drives – speculation which Sony effectively confirmed this week by announcing that it would shut down production of physical discs for any new games that launch after January 2028. 

Naturally, there are some cost savings for publishers and platform holders committing to digital in this way, but the real motivation has more to do with pricing control. Putting discs out in the world allows people to exercise all manner of inconvenient consumer rights, such as lending their games to friends or selling them second-hand. It also puts game RRPs at the mercy of a whole assortment of retailers who may undercut digital pricing.

For Rockstar, the case for going digital is obvious. GTAVI is launching as a single-player game, which naturally creates a more active second-hand market than if it had a major online component. It's also launching exclusively on consoles, with no PC version yet announced, meaning that ultimate pricing control will now rest entirely with Rockstar and the two platform holders.

This approach – which will be the default for PlayStation after January 2028 – goes even further than Nintendo's game-key cards for Switch titles. Those cards – cartridges containing just a secure key for Nintendo's online store – also require a download of the entire game to work. Many consumers find that frustrating, but the cards do function like physical games otherwise. You can lend, borrow and resell them. No such accommodation exists for digital games on Sony's platform.

Many consumers won't even notice the change, of course. Digital sales have been steadily overshadowing physical retail sales for years. The platform holders have seemingly decided that the physical media holdouts (both among consumers and in the dwindling physical retail sector) are now a small enough minority that they can simply be told to deal with it.

Even if consumers don't notice the change, though, this is more than just a shift in the means of distribution. Sony itself proved the difference rather starkly last month, when it told people who had bought certain movies on the PlayStation Store that they would no longer have access to them due to the expiration of a licensing deal. It's a timely reminder that, in an all-digital world, 'bought' no longer means what the dictionary says it does. While that unilateral removal of purchased content from users' libraries was movies, it would be naïve to imagine that a similar thing won't happen to games, especially to older releases, whose legal status can be complicated, for example, by the expiration of music licences or the transference of IP rights. None of that matters to a disc on your shelf, but it matters a great deal if your 'ownership' is just a line in a corporation's database.

PC behaviour 

PC owners, of course, might wonder what all the fuss is about. The PC has essentially been a digital-only platform for almost two decades. The situation here, however, is genuinely different. Steam may be the dominant platform, but it's not the only storefront you can use. There's real competition between different digital distribution systems and using a different one is as easy as opening a different app. It's a stark contrast to console platforms, where the platform holder's pricing power is absolute. And, in future, it won't even face the external pressure from second-hand sales or physical retail prices being marked down.

It's the same situation that legislators, especially in the EU, have lately viewed very dimly on smartphones. Consoles have largely escaped their interest thus far, but GTAVI's launch this year is going to be a glimpse into a near future in which the 'monopoly' word is going to be bandied about liberally regarding console software sales channels. It seems unlikely that paper slips in plastic boxes will be enough of a fig leaf to fend off the beady eye of authorities in Brussels and elsewhere for long. After the many political controversies of GTA's past, it's perhaps apt that its launch may be an opening move in a looming showdown between platform holders and regulators.

Alex Hastings made his first Eve Online character in 2006, at the age of 16. Twenty years and several breaks later, he's still logging into New Eden with his in-game handle, Machiavelian. He's been playing so long, in fact, that he was giving interviews at Fanfest in Iceland this year. Now an attorney in his mid-30s, Hastings had no idea what he was getting himself into when he installed the MMO. 

"I had no perception or context for how deep a lot of the political things go, because I came from much simpler games like Freelancer," he says. "Coming from a much more simple single-player or small multiplayer game into a game like Eve, it was just mind-blowing because of the complexity of the relationships."

That complexity, and the human relationships built on top of it, is the glue that's stuck Hastings to Eve for two decades of play, including a stint of several years as a mid-level figure inside Pandemic Horde, a group of some 17,000 players. Hastings, a former police officer who now practises labour law, says the role was effectively a management job. "I was essentially more like a middle manager, handling a lot of human resources and administrative stuff," he says.

It's this social dimension that's kept him playing. "For me personally, it's the social relationships, the social aspects of it," he says. "Most of my time spent playing Eve was communicating, talking to people. I didn't even have the game open to do a lot of the work I did." His wife calls it his "space job". "The best man at my wedding, I met him through Eve," he says. "We've built these lifelong relationships that you probably wouldn't make in a game where you're role-playing as though you're the character."

Hands-off development

Able to give a unique perspective on the shaping of Eve Online over its 23-year history, Hastings, who sits on Eve's Council of Stellar Management, reserves particular praise for the restraint shown by the game's developer, Fenris Creations, in seeking to influence player-led affairs.

"I would call it interference, and I think Fenris has done a phenomenal job of staying out of it," he says. "That's the spirit of the game. We want to encourage real engagement between people. If the developer can come in and remove something you've worked very hard to negotiate or organise, that can have a huge knock-on effect that's completely unintended."

He points to Fenris's practice of "grandfathering" out old mechanics rather than tearing them down.

"When they make a change, if possible, they will try to grandfather it in," he says. "If they say, 'OK, you can no longer put this extra-large space station in this area of space,' they're not going to remove the space stations that are already there. But if they get destroyed, they're not going to allow you to replace them."

Managing the level of influence Fenris has over player narrative isn't simple, where even this type of decision can lead to anachronistic infrastructure negatively impacting the live game for some.

"It's been very frustrating," Hastings says, "because it creates situations like the largest group in the game having an unassailable capital system that's no longer possible to make. But the developers didn't want to mess with that, because at the time they built it, it was legitimate."

Fresh meat

New Eden, then, is no utopia. Asked what is most urgently in need of attention in Eve Online, Hastings does not hesitate: recruitment.

"The one thing I want [Fenris] to prioritise – and this is a very difficult problem to crack – is how do we get more new, younger players," he says. "Pretty much everybody I work with is my age or older. From a financial perspective, that's a good problem to have, because we have disposable income. But we do need more fresh players, because that brings new ideas in."

His deeper concern is structural. Because resources in New Eden reward cooperation over conflict, Hastings says, the game has drifted toward what players call the "blue doughnut": vast, low-cost alliances of convenience that leave little left to fight over.

"The cost of being friends with somebody is so low that eventually you have this big blue doughnut of all these people allied with each other, and then there's nothing to fight over," he says.

He cites the Imperium, Goonswarm's coalition, as the clearest case.

"They're 50 per cent of the players in nullsec, and that's too big to fail. There's nothing that's going to take that group down except them deciding to no longer be the big dog."

But, again, he's wary of a developer fix: "I don't know how Fenris can step in, and I worry that discouraging that kind of gameplay may break the game. At this point, just let it be. Those leaders are fabulously wealthy because of those groups. Those taxes flow upwards. There's no trickle-down economics in Eve."

But regardless of the attention constantly needed to keep New Eden evolving, the chances of Hastings bowing out after 20 years of space politics are zero. Struggle and problem solving are the keys to Eve's community. After Pandemic Horde, Hastings moved into another society. And now he's looking for another.

"That group fell apart a couple of months ago," he says. "So now we find a new home. Now I'm back on the search for what's going to hook me next."

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

Edge 425, featuring Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, is in UK stores and available to buy online here. Here are some extracts to get you in the mood: 

"At some point, when you know that you are at the end of a mechanic, you need to stop it. Otherwise we would have bored everyone." 
Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy creative director David Dedeine explains what happened to all those rats.

"I don't really believe in that philosophy that if you don't notice the music, it means it's good. It probably means that nothing really resonated for you. If you're in combat, I want you to notice the combat music as well. I don't want the music to be completely invisible."
Composer Jesper Kyd on the art of videogame soundtracks in 2026.

"The high you get when you get a new item and you remember all the places you can use it, I think that's one of the best feelings in games."
Animal Well creator Billy Basso joins us to explore the enduring delights of the Metroidvania genre.

"We’re looking after it for the community. I don't believe this is for me to come in with my 'incredible creative vision' and dictate."
Jagex's Kieren Charles on the act of preservation with Old School RuneScape.

"You can make a good game, but it's rare to make a game this good. It's the game I'm most proud of. It was a beautiful swansong for that era of League Of Geeks."
League Of Geeks' Trent Kusters reflects on the remaking of Solium Infernum.

"Jubensha is a kind of in-person game that has been enormous in China for over a decade now. There it has spawned dedicated escape-room-style venues, TV-show formats and, according to Chronic Insanity, one of the organisers of this event, 'a billion-yuan [about £100m] industry'." 
Alex Spencer spends a day seeking out new ways to play at Jubensha Con.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.