Grand Theft Auto VI and the death of the disc

On Christmas this year, countless people around the world will be unwrapping boxes that are empty inside.

Well, not exactly empty. Each one will contain a slip of paper with a voucher for a download of Grand Theft Auto VI, the sixth instalment in one of the most popular video-game series in existence. The game will be sold in stores, in disc cases, but there will be no discs inside. It will be available only in digital formats.

For many fans, this will be the first time in their lives a publisher has not given them the option of buying a major game in some kind of physical form. GTA VI is the first title of its calibre to try it. There is plenty of reason to believe it won’t be the last.

To say GTA VI has been anticipated is an understatement on par with saying Godot was running a little behind. Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013 and has now sold more than 230 million copies. Fans have spent nearly a decade and a half awaiting an entirely new take on GTA’s fictionalized American criminal underworld. Announcements in May and November of last year that GTA VI’s release was being delayed were met with internet-wide groans of frustration. Its final, confirmed debut will happen on Nov. 19, just in time for the holiday shopping season.

But the revelation over the summer that GTA VI will be available only digitally has made the game’s release into a different cultural moment than it was expected to be. GTA VI has become a focal point for anxieties about how the concept of ownership will change in coming decades, as more of life is digitized. And it has stirred up emotions that seem to emanate from somewhere deeper and less rational.

The backlash has veered into actual – not simulated – crime.

An anonymous hacker or group of hackers claimed to have stolen a complete copy of GTA VI, and threatened in October to leak it on the internet unless Take-Two Interactive, parent company of developer Rockstar Games, issued a public apology and released the game on disc. The threat was credible – the same person or group had released seemingly authentic videos and screenshots of the game – but the leaker was also demanding money from fans and backed down when not enough materialized.

Even as music and movies have evaporated into the cloud, many video-game devotees have remained attached to physical formats. It’s not unusual for games from decades ago to skyrocket in value as people bid up their prices on eBay.

But digital downloads are now the most common way games are sold, and it has become routine for smaller games to skip physical releases entirely. In the last fiscal year, Sony reported that 76 per cent of the games sold for its PlayStation platforms were digital. The company announced over the summer that it would end production of PlayStation discs entirely in 2028.

That is the environment in which Take-Two announced that GTA VI, which will be released initially for both PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S, would be a “code in box.” (It can also be bought without the box, directly through the Xbox and PlayStation online storefronts.)

Other online discontent with the decision has been less menacing. Reddit forums have filled up with expressions of dismay, bordering on grief. An online petition decrying GTA VI’s digital-only release and imploring Sony to keep producing discs has received nearly 400,000 signatures.

The petition notes something many collectors of video games are increasingly aware of: Most digital game purchases, including those on Sony’s platforms, are revokable. The software is indefinitely licensed to users, not sold. If changing user habits are pulling publishers in the direction of digital, this is the push: A digital game, movie or song can’t be lent or resold the way a disc can.

The petition was started by Jade Pearce, who has a stake in this fight. He is owner and CEO of PNP Games, a Winnipeg-based retailer that sells video games online and at three brick-and-mortar stores. “I think ownership is a big thing,” he said. “Digital games get delisted, licences can get revoked. Digital storefronts close.”

But the scale and intensity of the disappointment points to more than just a legal concern. “I think there’s a real emotional attachment to the medium for a lot of folks,” said Mat Piscatella, executive director of games at the consumer data analytics company Circana.

“My sense is this shift away from physical almost feels like a betrayal of that passion and love.”

GTA VI follows a formula first established in 2001 with the release of GTA III, the first game in the series to set players loose in a fully realized three-dimensional city environment where they were free to wander as they pleased, carjack hapless civilians, run over pedestrians, evade and kill the police officers who responded – and, when they were tired of all that, advance a central story about a small-time thug who gets inveigled into working for organized crime. Outcry about GTA III’s morality only solidified its legend, and its design DNA is now woven into many major games.

But with GTA VI, Rockstar Games has promised players a game that uses the latest tech to make all of this new again. A splashy half-hour preview video released on Netflix in August – the main tentpole of the game’s promotional push – opens in medias res with the game’s two protagonists, Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, running and gunning their way out of a drug deal gone bad at a shabby apartment block in Vice City, the fictionalized version of Miami that Rockstar has confirmed is one of the game’s main settings.

The video shows the scope of the game’s world: a domestic scene with Jason and Lucia, a breathtaking car chase through pseudo-Floridian streets. There are convenience stores to rob, friends to meet, an original score by the French electronic music duo Justice. Lucia is a playable character with a voice and a backstory, a first for a series that has never cared much about passing the Bechdel test.

For millions of GTA fans, it will not matter whether this game is a digital download or a disc they can own and hold. But that is not the case for Nick Charles.

“I was very interested in buying the game,” he said recently. “When it got announced, I was super excited for it.” But then he learned there would be nothing in the box but a download code. “Just a code feels like an insult to me,” he said. “I want to have that disc. I want to put it in my game console and say, ‘Hey, I own this. This is mine.’”

Charles, 28, was one of hundreds of people lined up outside an EB Games on Yonge Street in Toronto on Nov. 4, waiting in light rain for the midnight debut of the only major new release that dared to challenge GTA VI’s dominance this month: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Ocarina of Time is in some ways a perfect foil for GTA VI, and the timing of their debuts has created a Barbenheimerish cultural split-screen. GTA VI will have a wide release on multiple platforms. Ocarina of Time was developed in-house by Nintendo and released only on its own platform, the Nintendo Switch 2. GTA VI is a violent, sexy crime story.

Ocarina of Time is about a child who goes on a magical time-travelling quest with his fairy friend because a talking tree tells him to. The game itself is a sort of time-traveller, a modern remake of one of the most beloved games in the Zelda series, originally released in 1998.

And while Take-Two has embraced an all-digital release, Nintendo built its game’s launch around in-store hype. Ocarina of Time was released on cartridges, and fans were promised limited-edition cover art if they were among the first to buy. Even though the game was also released digitally, stores around the country held midnight launch events and drew crowds.

The lineup in Toronto stretched around a city block and seemed almost to vibrate with excitement. Many of the people in it said they have relationships with physical media that are more than transactional. Their games, books, movies and music feel like parts of themselves, or pieces of their past.

“There is value for me in connecting my memories and experiences just visually from seeing it,” Brian Hume, 33, said of his collection. “I have some digital movies, digital games, because you know, that’s just the world we live in. But when I’m scrolling through those on my console or my TV, whatever, I don’t really connect the memory so much with it. And for me, the physical media does connect.”

At the very front of the queue was 45-year-old Syed Hussain, who said he’d arrived at 9 a.m. to claim his spot. “It is a betrayal,” he said of Sony’s decision to phase out discs. “That’s why I personally don’t buy that many Sony games anymore.”

The decision not to release GTA VI on disc? “Very disappointing,” he said. “Not to say I haven’t bought the game. I already prepurchased it.”

Behind him snaked a column of people who had left their homes on a rainy evening to lay hands on something they would treasure – an object meaningful not so much for what it is as for what it represents: an ocarina of time, a grand theft.