/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9751438
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Also, publishers tended to not want to deliver games on mediums that were not already very well established or pre-built systems generally didn't have the drives included for. It took forever for publishers to start releasing PC games on DVDs instead of CDs well into the era when DVD drives were standard in computers just to make sure they don't alienate people who still have an old computer with only a CD-ROM drive..... people who would not have the CPU/GPU to run such a game anyway.... and we NEVER got PC games on Blu-Ray since even to this day if you hunt down a new pre-built desktop or laptop that still includes an optical drive, it will be DVD-RW, not Blu-Ray. Even though Blu-Ray drives for both exist.

Even the very very few modern PC games that still get released physically, like Tokyo Ghostwire (Yes it has a physical PC release, that tends to be quite cheap compared to Steam even during sales), are on a DVD and not a Blu-Ray.

I remember when I picked up Psychonauts on PC, it came on five CDs despite the fact that it came out in 2005 and it was already common for PCs to come standard with a DVD drive in 2001... and yet my Pentium 3/Geforce3 system from the early 00 era that came with a DVD-ROM was not able to run the game at anything other than a slideshow.

And finally, the main advantage of ZIP disks was that they were re-writable but much much larger and faster than a floppy... yet a fraction of the capacity of a CD. Only the last-gen ones hit 750MB... and cost a lot more... while still being around the speed of an 8x CD DRIVE when CD-ROM drives had hit 48x speeds by then.

A game disk has little reason to be re-writable, in fact that's seen as a downside. Couple that with the much more expensive disks, much slower media, lower capacity, and the fact that almost no PCs came with ZIP drives while CD-ROMS has been standard since the early/mid 90s in PCs and there is your mountain of reasons why games never came on ZIP.