Steam Proves an All-Digital Future (Mostly) Works - IGN

As a PC gamer who hasn’t bought a disc in a decade, I think there are still reasons to be wary of PlayStation's digital future.

Game discs have taken a one-two punch over the last couple of weeks: first Rockstar’s announcement that the biggest game launch of the decade won’t include a physical release, then Sony laying out plans to stop making discs for PlayStation consoles by January 2028. Backlash has been fierce, but it’s hard to imagine either company u-turning – the discless future is on its way, whether we like it or not.

For gamers on PC, however, that future is already the present. A desktop has long been my main gaming machine, and frankly I can’t remember the last time I bought a disc – it’s been a while since I’ve even had a drive to slot one into.

For over a decade, discless has been the blanket status quo on PC. While that has come with problems, overall the platform is thriving more than ever, with most players now deeply loyal to dominant digital storefront Steam.

Does that mean a digital future for consoles is all going to be a-ok? Well… maybe. Let’s look back at the history of discless gaming on PC – and what it tells us about where things will go from here.

When Steam first launched in 2003, it was not warmly received. Many players saw it as unnecessary digital rights management (DRM), questioned the purpose of Valve’s new digital storefront, and resisted the idea of ongoing patches and updates to their games.

At the time, that resistance was understandable. Many players were still on dial-up connections, and the idea of being always online was still a long way off. On top of that, the user experience of launch-era Steam was clunky – an awkward hurdle to jump to be part of an idea that felt half-formed.

But if you wanted Half-Life 2, and then Portal and Team Fortress 2, you had to get used to it – what were you going to do, not play some of the best PC games ever made? That gave it a foothold, and before long it grew on us.

The addition of 3rd party games to the storefront – starting with the oft-forgotten Rag Doll Kung Fu – cemented the idea that it could be something bigger than just a place to download Valve games. The Steam app itself became increasingly slick and functional. And around it, the world caught up, with both faster internet speeds and bigger hard drives becoming more and more accessible.

At the same time, those factors were contributing to the rise of online PC game piracy – a looming (if arguably overstated) threat that, combined with the second-hand market, made publishers increasingly wary of physical discs. Methods were deployed to encourage players not to share or copy discs, including one-time-use codes unlocking exclusive content and online multiplayer modes in singleplayer games. But none were as effective as simply selling games digitally, forever bound to one person’s account.

For consumers, Steam increasingly became less an obstruction and more a convenience – a one-stop shop for all your games, with regular sales and offers that physical stores couldn’t match encouraging loyalty. As players increasingly chose digital purchases over physical, publishers figured they were better off pulling back on physical discs and investing in their own attempts at digital storefronts instead (to varying degrees of success).

By the 2010s, physical game discs for PC were already practically unheard of, and as the same move to digital and streaming solutions happened across software, music, film, and TV, soon the final nail was hammered into the coffin: PCs stopped shipping with disc drives at all. The CD-ROM was officially dead.

So, how’s that going now? Well, not too bad for the most part. These days, those playing primarily on PC hardly miss game discs at all – even in their most nostalgic moments sparing more of a thought for cloth maps and chunky manuals than the CD-ROMs that came with them. In fact, most have become so accustomed to the modern convenience of Steam that they resent any other method or platform for purchasing games.

We’ve willingly given up physical media and the benefits that do come with it, trading second hand markets and game sharing for 75% off sales and enormous backlogs.