There’s a lot of discussion happening around the value of physical video game discs thanks to Sony announcing it will be discontinuing discs for PlayStation games in 2028 . They give people a tangible thing to put on their shelves, help people in places with poor internet speeds play games on day one, and are the beating heart of retro game stores and the centerpoint of community gatherings during events like midnight releases. One wrinkle in the whole discussion around their importance is that these days, more often than not, a lot of big games have a day-one patch, so the game that’s actually on the disc itself is usually not the intended experience.

In a roundtable discussion at the SKY31 Convention Seoul (thanks, Inven Global ), several veteran developers like Tekken director Katuhiro Harada, Cyberpunk associate game director Pawel Sasko, and ex-Sony Interactive Entertainment President Shuhei Yoshida talked about console game development.…