Comment by sylens

Physical disks were one of the last differentiators that consoles had. 20 years ago, you could buy a game, take it home, put it into the console, and begin playing straightaway. Now it has to be installed first to storage, which of course the console has a finite amount of and will cost you more money to expand it. There's also been a complete shift from local multiplayer and dedicated servers/server browsers to gating online play behind subscriptions and forcing everyone through matchmaking in order to serve up cannon fodder for more experienced players.