An increasing number of games sold on discs or cartridges cannot be fully played in the future without downloading patches or essential content from online servers. This weakens the preservation value of physical releases, particularly as Sony’s planned move away from physical PlayStation games has renewed attention on media that should work independently of the internet.

The preservation group DoesItPlay has tested thousands of releases and found that 27% require downloads to fix serious bugs or access core content; the figure rises to 34% for PlayStation 5 games and 50% for Xbox Series X titles. Some discs contain severely flawed launch versions, such as Cyberpunk 2077, while others hold only a small part of the game and require large downloads, including Doom: The Dark Ages, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and The Outer Worlds 2.