Plop.

To be fair, I haven’t bought a physical Xbox game from Walmart since I got Elden Ring. Most physical copies I buy are from used game stores because they’re cheaper, there’s a wider selection, and they offer discontinued/360 games as well.

Target and Best Buy are already removing physical movies from their stores. It was only a matter of time before these guys targeted video games as well.

the apocalypse is nigh

Zero physical copies = zero manufacturing costs for games.

Game prices should not be going up.

and it also means it's harder to get older games as time goes by, because they will not be available.
emulation might also get some trouble, because i think they rip from the game cartridges, so in the future it might be harder to create an emulation of a game without it being illegal/questionable/lwk piracy because it's new and before the eshop shuts down etc
pretty much say goodbye to having a game forever

That’s why I can emulate Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi, and Mario Sunshine from the GameCube.

But emulating from the Series X will be literally impossible (it already is with Xbox One). Especially with games like Hi-Fi Rush or Jedi Survivor which either have no physical version or don’t have the whole game on the disc.

yeah, which makes me worried. i like playing satsr on my wii and sad3 on my computer, which had physical releases way back that makes it possible to still play them. but in the future, if the physical market becomes nonexistent, preserving games will become impossible or at least incredibly difficult to do without it being illegal, because i assume that if an emulation is made of a game released too recently, it would be piracy

oh god