This means you can't pass the game around to your friends or sell it afterwards, which completely ruins the purpose of physical media imo. I mostly play PC these days so this doesn't affect me, but it's a disappointing direction for console games. At least they could've used an empty disc that has proof of ownership.
EDIT: Bethesda has confirmed that only the PC version won't include a disc. Physical versions of Xbox will include a disc. Whew.
It's funny how this is never an issue when people are buying their latest favorite indie game that's only available to download.
How many of our favorite indie games are massive file sizes with draconian DRM?
Are they released as a "physical release" without the game actually being physically there?
To be fair, indie games don't get hounded for that because they more often than not don't have the big ass budget most AAA studios do to spend on stuff like physical copies and such. Dunno, I'd love to have all my games physically, but I'm also not gonna look at a small dev team or lone indie dev and expect them to be able to pony up for anything other than say, a limited number of physical copies of thier games....but then, what do I know, it could be dirt cheap to do so (but I doubt it).
Because it's commonly understood that they simply don't have the resources to do so.