The PS5 Pro's major missing feature and a £5 copy of Forspoken has shown me a future I really don't want

I bought Forspoken on PS5 for £5. I didn't want to play Forspoken at all, but I had £5. Forspoken on PS5 has sat on my desk (complete with character cards) sealed since November 17, 2023. Yes, this was a waste of £5. I'm an idiot who does stuff like this (glances over at a shelf full of Mega Drive games I can't play as I don't own a Mega Drive), but in recent days this pristine copy of a middling PS5 exclusive from Square Enix has started to haunt me. I no longer have a PS5 with a disc drive, so of course I want to play Forspoken more than I've wanted to play any other game in my life.

OK, hyperbole much? I'll admit that I wanted to play Gears of War 2 more than I currently want to play Forspoken. Happy? Back to the point that I've yet to make: I don't think I'm happy with the prospect of an all-digital future for games consoles. When the PS5 Pro arrived my OG PS5 got shipped off to a nice farm I'd heard is wonderful, and things seemed great. I didn't hear anything from the old girl, but me and the Pro were getting on brilliantly. That new console excitement has reinvigorated my desire to play games (that aren't Balatro), so I've been going through my library and checking out loads that I'd never played or bounced off for whatever reason. I was happy. Or so I thought.

Very few people will know what I'm talking about here, but I'm going to briefly talk about the 1989 film "How to Get Ahead in Advertising." In the film an advertising exec, played by Richard E. Grant, grows a boil on the side of his neck, and eventually this boil starts to exhibit personality of its own. Long story short, the boil takes over, completely changing the person he was. His wife ends up leaving him because he's become a nasty, cruel, obsessed man. I've got a boil and it really wants a PS5 disc drive.

I can hear it chuntering away, relentlessly mocking me for not having a way to play physical media on a PS5. And it's got a point. It's not just Forspoken that now lies unplayable. I've got about 40 PS4 games on a shelf and a smattering of PS5 ones. The boil's right, isn't it? I do need a PS5 disc drive. A future without a drive in a console feels restrictive, and gated in a bad way. It's not a private estate with a fancy gate that opens when your massive Porsche approaches, it's a £160 train ticket to Sheffield because there's no other option. What an idiot I've been, again.

It's not helped, frankly, that the Black Friday sales have started. Final Fantasy 16 dropped to £15 and Lords of the Fallen to just £13 - the latter supposedly a gem on the PS5 Pro. Both of these are at least double the price on the digital PlayStation store, and the same runs true for loads of games. I've essentially locked myself out of the physical library I own and the ability to cheaply buy plenty of games I want to own. On an impulse driven no doubt by some kind of Black Friday frenzy I bought FF16 and LotF. That was it. I now had to buy a PS5 disc drive. And that, dear reader, is giving me the blu-rayge! [Editor's note: I am so sorry.]

The official PS5 disc drive for the PS5 Pro and discless PS5 costs £99.99. There are no third-party options. I knew stock was in and out, but assumed that after a few days of trying I'd nab one, the boil would disappear, and my life would return to a happy equilibrium. Wrong! I'm six days into "Operation Disc Drive" and I'm starting to unravel. I've got three automatic stock checking tools open all day (I've checked them three times while writing this, although the irony of missing out while writing this hasn't deserted me), I manually check all the websites that have recently had stock whenever I get the chance, and the first thing I do in the morning is refresh PlayStation Direct. I've seen the "Buy" button so many times only for my basket to appear empty once clicking it that I'm semi convinced I'm in a very niche version of Punk'd (at least that reference is only 20 years old!).

eBay has been calling to me in the darkest moments of the night. "£140 isn't so bad," it suggests. "You're only really spending £40 if you think about it," it adds in a way that makes no sense even if you do think about it. And I have thought about it. Soon I'm going to have three unopened PS5 games I want to play that I can't. Is £40 worth it if it means I can get off this bullet train to misery? I refuse. I have some dignity, you know, and it seems to stop at £99.99.

All this has got me thinking, though. What's going to happen with the PlayStation 6 and the next Xbox? According to GI.biz, this year less than 20 percent of game sales on Xbox were physical and on PS5 it's just over 30 percent. As the site says, this will vary game to game, but it's only really Nintendo with the Switch that is maintaining a high percentage of physical sales on its platform (about 65 percent). There are issues surrounding the ownership of media, too, with physical games seen to be on steadier ground, but these days most games you buy on discs are updated so much digitally post-release that in some cases they end up barely resembling the original version. You might be one of the few people who owns a boxed copy of Concord on PS5, but it's now nothing more than a museum piece.

Losing physical games would be a real kick in the teeth to price-savvy gamers and for collectors. On PC games tend to be cheaper from the off, but there are also multiple stores to buy digital games from which drives competition. As I've already mentioned, consoles without disc drives gate their users from competitive discount pricing and this will inevitably see the cost of gaming rise even further on the next generation of devices. I'm not ready for that future and I hope other people feel the same. Maybe if enough of us start to grow obnoxiously loud sentient boils we can convince PlayStation and Xbox that physical media still has a place and is valued. Being forced to buy a disc drive add-on for the PS6 will be the beginning of the end. And it'll be a long beginning, because there'll never be any in stock.