You put discs in and play games. From that perspective you don’t need an internet connection.

However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.

It's worth noting that with the prevalence of day-one patches these days, it's entirely possible that the code on the disk is a barely playable mess.

It raises big concerns for archival—we'll eventually have high quality emulators for all of these systems, but to properly archive the games requires also archiving patches, which is difficult from both a logistical and copyright standpoint.

Recent example: the Cyberpunk people announced the latest delay after the game had already gone gold. So they’re taking an extra 3 weeks to fix it, while also pressing discs that have none of those fixes.

I might be wrong but it's not inconceivable that when newer batches of discs are manufactured they actually include the patches. Unless there's no more space, of course.

i see a future where if it’s going to be emulated the patch packages will either be included with the image OR the image available will be at last published version.

> However, if you want to play blu ray movies, you need to connect it to the internet to download a license. Sadly.

Just once.

Yes. Also this license is needed for DVD playback too.