FF7 Revelation Gets a Disc - but the Disc Alone Won't Run the Game

Good news first: Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, the closer of the Remake trilogy, is getting a physical edition. For everyone who still buys boxes, that sounds like a small victory. Then comes the fine print - the disc requires an internet connection to download additional game data before you can play, and that applies to every platform.

Remake and Rebirth both shipped on two discs and were content complete out of the box. Revelation squeezes onto a single disc, and the missing part has to come from somewhere: a server. The official wording, as quoted by Eurogamer, leaves no room for interpretation: "An internet connection is required to download additional game data in order to play the physical version of the game."

So what are you actually buying?

Let's be honest about why people in our region still buy physical. It's rarely nostalgia. A disc you can lend to a friend, resell locally when you're done, or pick up second-hand for half the launch price effectively cuts the real cost of an expensive AAA release. That logic still mostly works here - the second-hand copy will still boot the game, as long as the download servers exist.

And that's the part that bothers me. "As long as the servers exist" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A complete-on-disc game is yours for decades; a disc that's half download key is yours until someone at a corporate meeting decides the trilogy's servers aren't worth the hosting bill. We've seen that movie before with delisted games and dead storefronts.

There's also the mundane problem nobody at Square Enix seems to think about: not everyone has fast, uncapped internet. If the mandatory download turns out to be tens of gigabytes, launch day for some players outside the big cities means an overnight wait - with a disc spinning in the console the whole time.

I get the economics. One disc is cheaper to press than two, and most buyers went digital anyway. But if the box on the shelf is essentially a download voucher in nicer packaging, then call it what it is. The one honest advantage physical still had was independence - from your connection, from storefronts, from someone else's servers. Revelation's disc keeps the box and quietly drops the independence.

Image: PiaCarrot / CC BY-SA 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CD-ROM_for_PlayStation.jpg