The Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth trailer at Summer Game Fest last week ended with a surprising announcement. Not the release window, which only got slightly more specific than it was before (early 2024, as opposed to ‘this winter’). Instead, the standout detail was that the physical version of the game will be released on two discs.
It’s a funny thing to put into an announcement trailer. This isn't some bold new approach to physical media; the last game was also on two discs and it wasn’t a marketing bullet point. But fans have largely dismissed this as a nostalgia play for the players who grew up with Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation, where it was divided across three discs. In 2023, the content on discs seem increasingly irrelevant thanks to massive day one patches, making the effort to release it on multiple discs seem unimportant.
But as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s physical release made clear, there are real stakes in the details of a game's physical release. My colleague Eric Switzer wrote that the method EA used for Survivor's physical launch should be illegal, and I agree. That game released with a disc, but if you put it in your PS5, it only allowed you to play the opening mission. To get the rest of the game, you needed to connect to Wi-Fi and download a massive file containing most of the game. That's annoying in the short term, if you have data caps, slow Wi-Fi, or if you, like me during my first years as a freelancer, can't afford Wi-Fi at all.
It also has more pernicious effects in the long term. As Eric noted in that article, those Jedi: Survivor discs are ticking time bombs. When Sony and Microsoft stop supporting their current-gen consoles, there's going to come a point that players who have Jedi: Survivor on disc won't be able to play it anymore (at least beyond the opening mission) despite owning a copy of the game. This is a problem that started with the advent of download-only games, and has resulted in tons of games being wiped from existence. There are games that I purchased on my iPhone that are no longer available at all because they haven't been updated. You can sometimes get around this by going to your list of purchased games, but I have one in particular that I've wanted to revisit — Lost Treasures of Infocom, which collected a bunch of old text-based adventure games — that isn't available that way, either. It's just gone, and the money I spent to own it is gone, too.
While Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth launching on multiple discs is exciting for veteran PS1 players, it isn't just nostalgic in the way that it seems to be. Yes, it's recapturing the experience of switching between discs for a meaty RPG in the '90s, but it's also hearkening back to a time when if you owned a disc, you actually owned a game. If I wanted to play the original Final Fantasy 7 today, I could go buy a PlayStation, track down a physical copy, and start playing. If, in 26 years, I get nostalgic for games from the PS5 era, I may be out of luck.