Why will my portable disc drive not play my pc games?

Hi,

Back when PC games were largely available still on DVD optical discs, many developers added different forms of DRM to prevent (or at least try) to prevent illegal duplication of the game and piracy. Some of the techniques and software used are no longer supported under Windows 10 and 11.

A good example of this is are games that used DRM systems such as or similar to SafeDisk. This may explain why your game installed from DVD isn't working. There can be workarounds, but it depends on the game.

Games download on Steam use a different type of DRM which does not have issues with Windows 10 and 11.

Best to go to the PC gaming Wiki, search for your game on there and see if there are any issues running the original disc version on a later version of Windows.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home

Hello, first it's a pleasure to be able to help you today.

My name is welcome to the community and Happy New Year.

Hello JessCee, this cd`s who comes with games the game does not run directly from the CD player, it needs to be installed on your PC and usually it has minimum system requirements to be installed.

This information is usually on the game box or even printed on the CD.

If it is very old games, such as 16 bit games or games that ran on Windows XP or 7 and 8, it is unlikely that they can be installed on a PC with Win 10 or 11.

I prefer to have an external HDD for my games anyway. I leave the internal 500GB drive for the OS and any apps I use. Put all my games onto a portable 3TB external HDD. Then, when I go to my friends and relatives I just grab my drive and discs so I can plug
it in there, log in, and play.

If you used a fast SD-card, you wouldn't need to install to hard drive, you could could just run it straight from the SD-card or indeed from a top end USB 3.0 Flash drive. Top tier SD Memory are capable of reading data at just over 312MB/s (Megabytes per
second), which, incidentally, is the just slightly over the maximum speed of the SATA II interface that both the Xbox One and the PS4 hard drives use. Games are not copied over as an ISO like I said before.

The main reason games are on Blu-ray is cost. I would say a Flash stored 50GB game would add an extra £10 to the overall cost. BD discs are cheap to mass buy and mass duplicate, SD and Flash drive games would be expensive.

The Nintendo DS, the 3DS and the PlayStation Vita use SD cards for their games. But they use SD storage for practical reasons, because with the device being portable, a small disc format would drain the battery more quickly - case in point, the PlayStation
Portable.

In the case of GTA V for the 360, the recommendation is to install only the Install disc to the hard drive and not the play disc as well. If you did choose to do both, the poor Xbox 360 hard drive has to work much harder to stream the data. You can actually
improve the experience on the disc version of the game by installing the 'Play Disc' to a suitably fast USB Flash drive.

BDXL is a special type of Blu-ray disc and needs a BDXL capable BD drive to be read. I doubt whether the format will take on, the discs themselves cost almost as much as the drives that read them. A typical BDXL disc can cost anything from £35-£50! With
a maximum disc size of 128GB, it's cheaper to buy a 500GB or 1TB external hard drive. To my knowledge BDXL drives can not read UHD movie discs.

Blu-ray drive take up for PC's is quite low. Software and games are not available on Blu-ray. Games either come on multiple DVD's or are only available digital only. I haven't bought a PC game on disc for over three years and most game stores are no longer
selling PC games on disc as the publishers are no longer releasing them.

Oh that's a bummer, why is that a thing? Thanks for telling me

It is a licence validation thing. For the digital copy they can control how it is used and ensure only the account that purchased it will be using it, with disc, they can't do that really.

The benefit of disc: portability, usually cheaper

The benefit of digital: play anywhere

It is a choice which you go for, sorry you can't play on PC this time around.