Having to wait for new games to install even when you have them on disc is ruining Christmas.
Not to go on one of my classic boomer rants, but remember when Guitar Hero 2 came out and I was allowed to open it on Christmas Eve night? Remember how I played it so late into the night that I woke my dad up and he came into my room in just his boxers and yelled at me to go to sleep? Then I spent most of Christmas Day just wishing I could go back home from my grandparents house and play it more, completely ignoring and misunderstanding the emotional core of the holiday? Remember that? Remember how I repeated it the year that Call of Duty: World at War came out and then again with Fallout 3?
Kids don’t get to disrespect the holiday like that anymore. Games are all digital now and get beamed down into your Xbox from a god dimension called “the cloud.” Kids don’t get the joy of flipping through a little manual on the inside of the box that has a page showing which button throws grenades and has exactly two paragraphs of lore that would have been impossible to convey through cutscenes.
Instead, children get the reward of waiting. They get to rush to their console with their new game, only to insert the disc and wait for it to then install 200GBs of gunfire sound effects. How are kids today supposed to fill that time? What are they supposed to do, go back to their family and “hang out” for an hour while their game installs? God forbid if they got multiple games. That sounds insane. That’s not what Christmas is about.
Christmas is about being loaded with ham having your headset back on by 4:00 P.M.