
Wait until you hear how much Iāve given Microsoft and Nintendo. Thatās every PS5 game I own, and itās about a fifth of the size of my Xbox and Nintendo libraries. I donāt mind giving companies money to OWN things. I have no interest in paying them for the privilege of playing their game until they decide I canāt.
Owning a license is owning a license to the software. The files needed to play are on the disc and are transferable with the disc. I can lend you a copy or I can sell it to you and you can play it. A ālicenseā does not grant you access to the source code to produce your own copies of the game to redistribute, which is perhaps where your confusion lies, but it is a legally fungible copy of the game.
The fact that you have to download a huge bunch of files is because games are rushed to āgold masterā status without being completely bug free and you often have to download patches day 1 to fix the most egregious bugs. The way game architectures can work you may need to download quite a lot of files to make it playable. Alternatively some games may require āinstallationā in order to run, which takes the game files and unzips them on a hard disk for faster load times.
I remember when I had an Xbox One, I would have to download the whole game after inserting the disc via the Microsoft store. I couldnāt offline and the download speeds were limited to my internet download speeds as opposed to CD -> HDD file transfer which I would assume to be faster than 10 mbps which is around my old shitty AT&T ISP
At any rate, you do bring up some very important implications considering the fact that more and more game discs are just licenses and do not contain any actual files. One of the big ways weāre able to preserve old games that are no longer hosted on platforms (the Nintendo 3DS is a great example) is because the discs and the carts _hold the game files_. Some of these may just be lost to the sands of time, and itās corporate greed that lands us in that position.