PC Gaming

Guild Wars 2 was on disc for me.

I haven't had a disk drive in my PC for over 10 years now. It's a PITA even finding an inexpensive case that has front bays these days.

Last one must have been GTA 4 (I've meanwhile bought this on Steam so I can play it without) or Crazy Taxi (came with a cereal box in my childhood).

Eragon

installed from disc starfleet academy and mechwarrior 2 last week with lutrus.

I think the last disc-based game I played was Neverwinter Nights 2. Either that or the Command and Conquer Collection. That was probably around 2014.

I buy and play a bunch of old games from an EBay seller who sends both the original disc and a disc with a copy of the game that loads dosbox stuff or whatever else to make it work easily on a modern system without fiddling around. It's pretty great.

I have a bunch of strategy and sim games.

I finally just threw out my Diablo 2 and xpac discs. None of the computers in my home have optical drives anymore. I only keep the Blu-ray player around for my collectibles, and I rarely risk wearing them out just for a watch

I still have some floppies in working order, even.

But no, I don't play them regularly. It's just easier to make a backup that doesn't need a disk in the drive. Even most of my retro PCs these days run out of a large-ish hard drive replacement, so keeping games outside their unreliable original media and the original media elsewhere is a better alternative.

It's a bit different on consoles where carts are harder to duplicate and ingest, as well as being more reliable and loading faster. Floppies and optical media, particularly when you can access the files, less so.

Diablo 2 battle chest

I remember finally building a new PC that was halfway decent and wanting to play some quake 3 mods. So this would have been around 2005??

Broadband was here so I wanted to take advantage of that sweet low ping but needed a physical copy of the game for the mods to work.

Even then it was hard to source a game disc but I got it and had a few years of fun playing urban terror... I can't really be bothered with online shooters now but back then it was simple, quick and fun. There's too much going on in things like Apex and Overwatch for me.

Also my PC basically has a console setup in the living room and I play with a switch controller, so I'd get destroyed anyway!

I literally cannot remember the last time. This PC doesn't have any optical drives and I've had it for like 7 years now. I did use a USB optical drive once to install a driver for something. I can't even remember the last game I purchased that had a physical disc, honestly. I haven't bought a game requiring a disc since living in Japan so that's definitely a decade. Probably around 15 years, if I had to guess, and maybe even longer than that.

Half Life orange box, the last physical media I ever bought. 2009-10 ish. Still have the cosmetics for tf2

Probably Crysis.

Long enough ago that my DVD drive had sealed shut since then and I had to use a paperclip to open it.

I recently checked my box with old game CDs and DVDs, just out of curiosity, not because I wanted to play something. Most of the stuff is just sentimental value/nostalgia, but there's one promo disc/game, I tried to archive because I found nothing about it on the net, but I couldn't even read it. Others also have read errors, but I don't know if a better drive could still work (just have a cheap external one).

I think the last PC game I bought on disc was SC2: HotS, but I don't even know if I ever used them, since you can just download the game, after you've added it to your Battlenet account. Definitely haven't used game discs since 2014, because I remember building a PC then, putting in my old drive, but then I gave it away, because I just never needed it.

I've got a portable DVD player, and I'm going to use it to install the original Psychonauts onto my son's computer, so he can see what the meat circus was like before they softened it.

Starcraft 2 for me. I haven't had an optical drive in my pc for probably 10 years or so. The last "physical" game I bought was Mass Effect Andromeda, and it was just a box with a download code inside.

PC gamers were incentivized to move away from optical media asap, since optical drives read slowly compared to HDDs, and SSDs are even faster.

I don't have many disc based PC games anymore. Last I played one was less than a month ago ( don't know exactly how long ago ) and it was Luxor. I have a few others on disc, but I either don't have them installed or haven't played them in a while.

Not including Luxor because I already listed it, I also currently have Super Collapse, Morrowind and Oblivion ( both with expansions ), Brok The Investigator ( have it on Steam so I don't play the disk version or use the official collectors edition USB containing an installer either ), Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 and one of the expansions, some Dosney rollercoaster builder game that is pretty bad, and a normal blackjack game.

As for my absolute favorite, that's the easiest question ever: Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 Platinum.

I also have another one that I loved that I cannot remember or find basically anything about it anywhere in the web because it was probably some demo to a full game that wasn't out or didn't release. The whole thing was a mini-golf like hole where it starts you off in front of a drive-in movie theater with cars parked parallel to the screen, like they're parking in a parking lot at a grocers. You had to hit the ball up a ramp and into the screen, which was showing a black and white swamp film. You'd be sent into the movie and had to put around the water to get to the hole. Camera wouldn't move unless you entered a different area. Anybody know literally anything about that?

I have my own archive of games, lots of games actually.

I don't even usually play them though, but my rule of thumb is that if it requires an account, I won't play it, or even archive it.

Peter Pan in Disney's Return to Never Land (2002).

A friend brought it over and, as was usually the case, I burned a copy to keep for myself. It was my first encounter with DRM, and for completely unrelated reasons, the last time I interacted with physical game media of any kind.

2007, I think. I had recently moved and didn't have internet hooked up yet, so I bought BioShock as a physical disc so that I wouldn't have to wait. Imagine my frustration when I learned about the online-only authentication bullshit it used for DRM, so having the disc didn't even matter; without Internet I couldn't play the damn thing at all.

Very few games were playable from a CD (thrash loading speed).Usually the CD was required after install for DRM purposes only.

Not sure what the last one was, but the last couple PC games I bought physical copies of could be installed from the disc, but also had Steam keys in the box and then didn't require the disc to play.

The last time i used physical media for apc game would have probably been to install WoW back in like 2012

I have some small games on hard drive storage, do hard drive platters count as discs?

The last game that I remember that needed a disc to play was Battlefield 1942 and I made a virtual drive with an ISO so I didn't need to put the stupid disc in every time and listen to it spin up. Current PC doesn't have a drive at all.

While I think a lot of the old box art was neat and all, I don't miss the physical requirements that took up space and all the manual updates and whatnot. Absolutely love steam's digital store and if that ever shits the bed and there isn't an alternate I will just stop PC gaming because the effort to manage all that stuff isn't worth it any more. Music and movies are the same, the physical media was nice for its time but I don't need to interact with it to use it anymore.

Now I want to install a game to a disk and run it from the disk drive, my dad’s old desktop has a drive. I wonder if it can burn dvds.

Maybe I could install stardew valley to the disk.

The last time I played a PC game on a physical disc? Can I cheat a little bit here? I found a self burned CD from old early 2008 or earlier days. There were a few RPG Maker 2000 games on it, which I downloaded from internet cafes, such as Vampires Dawn (back then, when only a German version was available for the first game in series). And I played a few of them last year with an open source RPG Maker player called EasyRPG, but with RetroArch.

So yes, I played PC games in 2024 from a physical disc. But I leave it to you, if you count that. :D

I dusted off my old xbox 360 a month ago and played a few games on it. Aside from that, not for quite a few years now.

My last physical media was the PC version of Titanfall, played in 2022 or so via USB disc drive. was surprised to find the entire game actually on the disc. Was pretty cool.

Last one was oblivion in 2011. New home no internet and the pc towen on the lunch table. Good memories

I think it might be Star Craft for me.