Now that Best Buy has announced plans to stop carrying physical video media, it’s looking like other major retailers are seeing the move as a green light to begin phasing out physical stock as well. While not yet confirmed or acknowledged by Walmart, there’s a claim circling now that the big box giant is now looking at dropping physical Xbox games.

This claim, as reported by Insider Gaming, comes from CEO of Limited Run Games Josh Fairhurst. In a tweet, he explained that he’d heard a rumor that Walmart wants to drop physical Xbox games soon. So, what we have here at the moment is a rumor heard by a games industry higher-up, and little more than that. What’s more, Limited Run Games has something of a partnership with Best Buy, so this might just be an attempt to make the store’s decision a little more palatable to customers. All the same, it’s worrisome to hear that physical media might be losing even more ground.

One would think we’d have seen the successor to Blu-Ray by now, but since videos/movies only require so much storage space and streaming has become so ubiquitos, there’s been no push for a new format. It’s really a shame too, as games just keep getting bigger and bigger, making effective storage more and more difficult.

I’m certain major video game companies would love nothing more than to have streaming become the main way customers engage with games too, in which case we as players would have finally been forced to give up any and all claims to ownership. Game preservation ironically becomes all but impossible at that point too, turning games that should have been the easiest to preserve into the most impossible.

I admit to downloading a lot of my games since new physical games tend to be at least 30% more expensive here in Japan, but I still think the existence of physical games is important. They keep makers a little more honest, as players can always just opt to play an older title rather than feel forced to buy something new. Take that away and suddenly there’s almost nothing keeping them in check. The past could be erased at will, and customers won’t even have a right complain since any future bad games would merely have been offered as part of some streaming service.

There’d be no need to even make people want to buy the games anymore, so you could just shovel out whatever you want (and you know that many of these developers/publishers would jump at that chance). I don’t mean to be all doom and gloom, but then the AAA games industry seldom gives us gamers cause to trust it, you know?

---

How do you feel about this development? Are you sorry to see physical media getting phased out or do you feel as though it’s about time? What do you think an all-digital future will look like?

Image is promotional artwork