Anticipating is mounting for the PlayStation 5 release of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, but there’s something about this release that may rub Sony fans the wrong way.
Dealabs editor and dataminer billbil-kun shared this information on Twitter:
“To address the most frequently asked question, both the Standard & Premium Editions of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will include a PS5 disc. HOWEVER, an Internet connection will still be required to download the game and its content.”
They also confirmed that they found this information in metadata.
This will surely be a huge disappointment to gamers who wanted to buy that disc for the purpose of having a copy of the game in the hypothetical event that it would no longer be available to download someday. If you didn’t know, Microsoft did not publish a physical version of the game for Xbox Series X|S.
What this all suggests is that Microsoft, Bethesda, possibly even MachineGames themselves, didn’t consider this as a game that should be playable offline. In spite of being a single player game, they may have designed the game in such a way that it can’t be packaged onto a physical disc. And so, the disc version may have some parts of the game, but that download will presumably be for the parts of the game that can’t be conveniently stored on disc.
To be clear, we don’t this is part of a nefarious plan to end physical games forever. Truthfully, there was a pressing need for a newer media format to replace Blu-Ray for some time now. Even the Ultra HD Blu-Ray format that PlayStation 5 discs are pressed on, don’t have enough storage to meet the needs of modern games.
Furthermore, games that are now being built with SSDs in mind will eventually run much better on that storage format than on physical discs. Given that Sony helped create the Blu-Ray and Ultra HD Blu-Ray formats themselves, one would expect them to be making plans around this.
Earlier this month, billbil-kun claimed that Indiana Jones and The Great Circle would release for the PlayStation 5 sometime in the middle of next month. While Microsoft opted for a time delayed release for PlayStation 5, this game proved to be such a critical and commercial hit that there is still a lot of interest and excitement for this PlayStation release.
Unfortunately, this news surrounding this disc release may undo some of that hype. But then again, this may simply be the latest step in what is a rapid end to discs as storage for video games. Even Nintendo’s Switch cartridges are closer to SSDs than discs.
Sony could fix this themselves, if they introduce their own disc format, something that may be proprietary for the PlayStation 6. Given where the industry is headed, however, Sony should have already been working on it for the past few years. And other companies, like Microsoft and Valve, could commission they own physical formats if they wanted. But we don’t have to explain why that’s unlikely now.
With all that said, in the case of Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, it remains to be seen if all these rumors are true after all.
