Star Wars Jedi: Survivor PS5 Physical Copies Still Require a Download

Images of the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor physical copies for PS5 reveal that the boxes have the words “Download Required” printed right on the cover. This has caused a stir among console players who believe that a game, particularly a single-player one, should be able to be played off a physical disc without requiring an internet connection. That said, given the massive file size for the game on PS5 at a whopping 147 GB, the fact that it requires a download isn’t terribly surprising.

The game’s 4K texture files likely can’t fit on the disc

As noted on a Star Wars Jedi Reddit, photos from retailer Mighty Ape show that the very small words “Download Required” are on the PS5 cover above the age rating. Since a Ultra-HD Blu-ray disc can only hold about 100 GB of data, it’s no surprise that players will need to download the rest of the game off of EA’s download servers. That said, it’s unclear if the disc even holds a part of the game at all or whether the disc just has a download key.

Either way, this means that if the servers for the game ever go down, players who haven’t installed the game already can’t play it off the disc. (If you want to sell the disc, you’ll probably need to do so before then.) Of course at that point no one else can download the game either.

At any rate, all of this trouble with physical copies for games over the last few console generations have made many players, by force or not, become more comfortable with digital downloads. The vast majority of players will want the day one patch anyway and access to future updates for any game, so an internet connection is mainly assumed at this point.

PS5 players will be able to start pre-loading the game on April 25-26, about two days before the game’s full launch.