GoKawiilSony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended.
For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.
“There is a clear trend that physical releases are increasingly treated with ignorance from larger companies,” DoesItPlay owner and head admin Clemens Itsel told Ars recently. “There is no reason physical games would ever die unless someone like Sony deliberately kills them.”
What’s missing
DoesItPlay got its start in 2019 as a passion project Twitter account maintained by Jon Doyle—who went on to found boutique physical game publisher Lost in Cult—and quickly developed into a small community of devoted physical game testers. In 2021, the group helped bring wider attention to the so-called “CBOMB” kill-switch, which threatened to make offline PS3 and PS4 consoles practically useless once their internal CMOS clock batteries failed.
When Sony eventually fixed this issue on the PS4 months later (though the PS3 remains unpatched), Itsel said he used that “breakthrough success” as an excuse to “professionalize and grow the project to what it is today.” From an initial spreadsheet tracking the group’s physical game tests, DoesItPlay has grown into a publicly searchable database of thousands of titles, each tested using a methodology designed to determine just how much the core game experience is impacted by playing exclusively on physical media.