Cormac Moylan, CMO at Loaded, argues that GTA VI could become the release that finally makes gaming’s shift away from physical discs impossible to ignore.

GTA VI will likely be the highest-grossing release ever. Yet at the same time, the game’s physical release is both meaningless and the most significant catalyst the gaming industry has seen this century.

By putting a download code inside a box instead of a disc, Rockstar is headlining a show the rest of the industry has spent a decade setting up.

The box exists because people still expect a box. But what’s inside it doesn’t need to exist.

CDs never fully disappeared, but they might as well have. Music went from physical to MP3s, the cloud, and eventually the smartphone. That change took years, but while CDs crumbled, the music industry didn’t. The format changed shape.

Game discs have been on a steady decline for over a decade. While physical sales still hold approximately 25% of the overall market across the UK and US, that figure is largely sustained by the back catalog. When it comes to new releases, the transition to digital is near-complete.

Capcom recently reported 93.3% of its total game revenue came from digital sales, leaving physical with just 7% share. XBOX is seeing an even steeper drop, with physical media accounting for just 4% of new game sales in the US in 2026 so far.

For many gamers, their ritual hasn’t changed at all in those past 10 years – put the disc in, press start, the exact same habit since the 90s, half convenience, half nostalgia.

The disc stopped being the thing you were actually playing the game from and, for the most part, became a shortcut to an installer that could just as easily run without it. Gaming has been asking players to move one habit at a time.

At Loaded, we’ve seen the shift play out from the retail side too. Digital purchasing is no longer the alternative way to buy a game. For a huge section of players, it is simply the normal way to buy one. Convenience, instant access, and the ability to shop around for value have changed what players expect from game retail.

GTA VI is the tipping point where the choice stops being invisible.

Console hardware has already evolved to be discless. The PS5 Digital Edition ships with no disc drive at all, and XBOX Series S has never had one.

Until now, however, disc support still existed alongside them. Buyers who wanted a drive could choose one. Discless was an option, not the default.

That’s what GTA VI actually hands Sony and Microsoft, whether Rockstar intended it or not, an open goal. GTA VI doesn’t need to kill off disc-supported consoles. It only needs to prove that the biggest game in the world can succeed without a disc drive.

If gamers accept that transition for a release as culturally significant as GTA VI, it becomes easier for the industry to ask whether maintaining two parallel ways of buying games still makes commercial sense.

If it’s cheaper to make a game without a disc, a box, or a warehouse full of stock to ship and secure, where’s the saving, and who’s actually benefiting?

Will digital-only distribution eventually mean cheaper games? Maybe. Cut the disc and the box, and that saving has to land somewhere. Time may have to tell where exactly.

What we do know is that choosing digital does not remove price sensitivity. Gamers still compare prices, wait for promotions and look for value. The ease of comparing digital offers can make consumers more aware of what they are paying.

Removing the cost of producing a disc means little to players if those savings are offset by reduced competition and fewer places to shop around.

What should worry gamers most isn’t losing a physical box. It’s the loss of choice.

Publishers still need to distribute through platforms such as Steam, the PlayStation Store, XBOX, so going digital isn’t the same as going direct-to-consumer. But it is a shorter route. A route that’s likely to cut out the high street retailer.

For stores like Loaded, that makes the role of digital retailers more important as physical retail contracts. A healthy digital market needs more than one route to purchase; it needs retailers competing on price, promotions, service and convenience rather than gamers being pushed towards a single storefront.

Platforms, however, have a history of sealing digital doors. Sony stopped third-party retailers such as Amazon and GameStop from selling full-game PlayStation download codes, effectively funnelling purchases to its own store. That decision subsequently became the subject of antitrust litigation alleging that removing third-party codes reduced price competition.

Nintendo has similarly tightened its grip, with third-party digital codes increasingly restricted outside gift card top-ups.

As physical discs disappear, platforms are constructing digital walled gardens. When they control both the storefront and key supply, they gain substantial market leverage.

Digital retailers will eventually become the last stop for consumer choice.

It would be easy to write this off as sentimentality. Some people simply like owning games and keeping the cases. But a genuine loss sits underneath the nostalgia.

A disc can run on hardware decades later regardless of what happens to the company that made it. A digital licence doesn’t offer that same guarantee.

It’s worth asking why GTA VI is shipping as code-in-a-box at all, rather than digital-only. There’s obvious commercial logic to maintaining some physical presence for a release of this scale.

GTA VI isn’t just selling to people who already own a current-gen console – it’s going to wake up a huge number of lapsed, dormant players who haven’t bought a game since San Andreas or since Trevor blew up our screens. Turning up in November to a fully disc-less launch, for a chunk of that audience, could read less like ‘the future’ and more like game over before they’d even had a chance to play.

Code-in-a-box is a compromise. It protects the physical ritual just long enough to condition the last generation of disc buyers into accepting their future digital-only vice.

GTA VI will likely be the best-selling release of the century, and it may also be the last one that gets to pretend the box still matters.

The point isn’t that GTA VI will kill physical gaming overnight. It doesn’t need to.

It only needs to prove that the biggest game in the world can launch successfully without relying on a disc.

Once that happens, the question for publishers, platforms and retailers changes from “are players ready for digital?” to “how much longer do we need physical at all?”

For gamers, the challenge will be ensuring that as the format changes, competition, affordability and choice do not disappear with it.

After GTA VI, there may simply be no release left big enough to hold that change back.