Over a third of physical PS5 games and half of Xbox Series X games need a download to work properly

Data from DoesItPlay — a site dedicated to testing whether physical game releases actually work without an internet connection — shows that 34% of tested PS5 games and 50% of tested Xbox Series X games require some kind of download before they work as intended. Across all platforms DoesItPlay has tested, 27% of physical releases need a download to fix game-breaking bugs or access core content missing from the disc itself.

For PS5, DoesItPlay has tested 792 games. Of those, 66% work fully off the disc, 17% are technically beatable but too buggy or missing central content, and 17% need a download to play at all. Xbox Series X fares worse — only 50% of tested games pass, with 38% needing a download and 12% in the buggy-but-beatable category. That Xbox figure comes from just 78 tested games, so it carries less statistical weight, but the direction is clear. The Nintendo Switch 2 leads both with 75% of its 48 tested games working fully offline. DoesItPlay owner and head admin Clemens Itsel put it bluntly to Ars Technica: "There is a clear trend that physical releases are increasingly treated with ignorance from larger companies. There is no reason physical games would ever die unless someone like Sony deliberately kills them."

The timing matters. Sony recently announced it will stop producing physical PlayStation game discs in 2028, and the PS6 is expected to ship without a disc drive at all. That makes the reliability of physical media a live issue right now, not a hypothetical one. The problems with download-dependent discs run in several directions: players with limited bandwidth pay twice — once for the disc, once in data — and when servers go offline, those downloads disappear permanently. Xbox servers went down just days ago, briefly locking some players out of games they physically own. For game preservationists, every title that ships with essential content held back on a server is a future preservation problem waiting to happen.

The broader picture is a slow-motion shift away from the original promise of physical media — buy it, own it, play it forever. As more publishers treat the disc as a license token rather than a complete product, the gap between what physical buyers expect and what they actually get keeps widening. With Sony's disc exit on the horizon, the window for pushing back on that trend is closing fast.