Is PS4 (or modern console) games need to be installed?
Maybe late to the game (no pun! :)) but ok.
I must say that my last console was a PS3, then I played on steam 2 or 3 times a year, now I was lend a PS4 by a friend cause I wanted to try some exclusivity but is it normal to install 20-30GB even when you own physical game ?
It was already a thing annoying back in the day on PS3 for some game (GTA 5 being the worst as far as remember) but here, it is getting ridiculous and seems to be default behavior for most games.
On PC, which is mostly dematerialized, why not, at least, you can use your computer in during the time but I don't expect that from a console.
Yes. The bottleneck with games consoles has basically always been how fast you can get into data into memory and optical media has become a limiting factor in the last few hardware generations. I would say games started recommending installation to reduce load times in the late 360/PS3 era and have slowly started requiring it as the latest games are targeted at systems with SSDs and no optical drive at all.
I never thought I would say that but if remote/streamed gaming is a thing and it works fast, I might consider this option.
Pretty sad how the media evolved.
Optical drives were a major bottleneck in every gaming system that used them. They were convenient because they offered a lot of data storage for cheap, but the trade off was that games performed worse than they could. The fact that consoles have moved off of optical storage and onto fast internal storage is a boon to people that care about performance. That may be a sad situation for you, but a lot of people find it to be a good thing.
There is basically no other choice now as optical drive speeds haven't kept up with hard drive and SSD speeds. The PS5 for example can read blu ray discs at around 35 MB/s, compared to its internal SSD speed of 7100 MB/s. Doing the math that makes reading the disc over 200 times slower. Imagine the loading screens.
Good news: steamlink can stream your pc games to your tv and you can play with a ds4 or xbox controller. It’s the more environmentally friendly way anyway and it works well.
Not all but some do. It depends on the developer. I think there is a website that lists which games need to download additional data. Just search for it.
Half right. They all need to be installed, as in run from the hard drive and not directly off the disc. Some games require you to also download even more content, as in, the disc doesn’t have all the data needed to run the game.