The era of the game disc may finally be over. Grand Theft Auto 6, the most anticipated video game in a generation, is launching digital-only. No physical disc inside the box.
For the British game industry, which has long been a global hub for publishing and development, this feels like a watershed moment. The publishers say it is about convenience and environmental savings. The real story is more human than that.
It is about relinquishing a physical claim. I spent the afternoon talking to gamers, shop owners and industry analysts in Soho. The mood is split.
One shopkeeper, a man who has sold discs since the 1990s, told me: "This is the end of a cultural ritual. Ripping open the plastic, smelling the manual, sliding the disc in."
He is right. But his shop has already started selling collectible art cards for games, a strange trade-off. For young players, the disc has no emotional pull.
They see it as a waste of plastic and shelf space. For older gamers, it represents ownership. But in a streaming world, ownership is a luxury, not a given.
The cultural shift here is about control. People feel safer with a disc because they can hold it. But the industry knows that once you go digital, you stop trading games, and you stop buying second-hand.
Britain's high streets, already battered, will lose another anchor. And yet, there is a quiet class dynamic at play. Broadband speeds and data caps still vary wildly across the country.
A digital-only GTA 6 means a young person in a rural village with poor internet cannot play on launch day. That is a new kind of digital divide. The human cost is not just about loss of jobs in pressing plants.
It is about who gets to play. The industry will call it progress. But progress without access is just privilege dressed in innovation.
As the disc disappears, so does a piece of our collective memory. The question is what replaces it. Not a better experience, that much is clear.
Just a faster one.
