Dan Houser has weighed in on the physical vs. digital debate and clearly favors giving players a choice. Speaking with IGN at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, the Rockstar Games co-founder said: “I love physical media; I think everyone does. If people want that, I think companies should provide it.” Lazlow Jones admitted he loves owning physical games but noted digital’s convenience: “We all have that sort of feeling of, you know, when you get that copy, and you put the disc in the console. But I also have to say I really like being at the airport and going, ‘Oh, cool, I can download some quick games to my Steam Deck for this 12-hour flight.’”

I will ALWAYS be an advocate for physical media. Buy DVDs, Blurays, Books, CDs, Vinyls, Disc Video Games Manga Comic books Etc You actually own them when you buy em They can't be altered when a company bends the knee to Fascist Govts

Sony recently said that most players now prefer buying games digitally instead of on physical discs, But physical media isn’t going away just yet. Music CD sales in the U.S. are up 16% compared to last year, with Gen Z helping fuel the comeback. Many younger people are buying CDs simply because they like owning their music instead of just streaming it. It’s similar to what has happened with vinyl records. Streaming is still the biggest way people listen to music, but physical formats are making a comeback with younger fans.

David Jaffe, the creator of God of War, says the move away from physical games isn’t driven by greed but by the economics of modern game development. According to Jaffe: “Here’s the actual uncomfortable truth: Phasing out physical media is not some evil, greedy, illuminati anti-consumer plot. It is just the brutal unavoidable financial reality of an industry trying to survive…when games cost $300 M+.” He also argued that third-party publishers aren’t pushing back against Sony’s shift toward digital because it benefits them: “You can see why third-party publishers are not fighting Sony on this, they’re popping champagne.” Jaffe believes that with AAA game budgets now regularly exceeding $300 million, publishers are looking for ways to cut costs and maximize revenue, and reducing reliance on physical media is one of those strategies.

🎉 🎉 🎉 We're open-sourcing Chronicles-OCR, a visual perception benchmark evaluating VLLMs on ancient Chinese characters. The dataset spans 3,000 years of evolution. It covers 7 historical scripts from Oracle Bone to Cursive, featuring 2,800 balanced images across highly diverse physical media. We assess models on 4 core tasks: • Character Spotting • Fine-grained Recognition • Ancient Text Parsing • Script Classification The evaluation reveals how visual distribution shifts affect model perception over time. Explore the dataset and paper below. 👇 📄 Paper: 🔗 GitHub: