Good news for those of us who still like owning our games. Insomniac Games has confirmed Marvel's Wolverine will be fully playable offline straight from the disc, no online check, no mandatory patch wall and no license handshake standing between you and the claw work. The confirmation comes via Level Up, and it lands right in the middle of the running argument over whether PlayStation still believes in physical media at all.

It's 2026, and "the disc works" is somehow a headline. Plenty of releases ship a disc that's really a download key in a plastic case, some are code-in-box placeholders, and day-one patches now run the size of a full Blu-ray. Retail shelf space keeps shrinking, Sony's hardware lineup skews more digital every year, so when a studio the size of Insomniac puts it on the record that Wolverine plays offline off the disc, it counts for something.

I keep thinking how absurd that sentence would've sounded in 1994. I imported Final Fantasy V on a Super Famicom cartridge around then, Japanese dictionary open in my lap, and that cart never once asked my console to phone home before it would boot. We went from pop-it-in-and-play to games that need to check in with a server before they load, and somewhere along the way we all just accepted it. Shouldn't have.

This matters beyond collector sentiment, too. Servers shut down, storefronts delist games, licenses expire, and something you paid for just evaporates. A disc that boots offline sidesteps every one of those failure points. Picture someone in 2046 pulling Wolverine off a shelf, sliding it into whatever PS5 still hums in their closet, and it just plays. Insomniac made that future possible with a manufacturing decision, not a promise.

Nina Alvarez is going to read this and tell me, again, that everything is moving online and my shelf of discs is a museum. Maybe so. But my imports have outlived dozens of servers and a few publishers. When's the last time a cartridge you owned asked permission to run? Mine never have.