Talking about PS4 and XBOX1.
All the games I've bought for my PS4 on disc still take a bit to do a download, and they use up hard drive space.
Anyway, I wonder how much of the game is actually on the discs, and am considering going straight up digital because its nice to not have to put in a disc to play.

Buy a capable Windows PC
Download Steam
Leave physical media in the past where it belongs
Enjoy a far better experience all around

Let's say a disc is made in the factory in July of 2018. You go to the store and buy said game which has been sitting on the shelf since then. It is now February of 2019. The developers of the game have released ten updates since the disc you bought was made. None of those updates are on the disc because it was made before them. You cannot play the game because it is out of date, hence the download. And they go on your hard drive because obviously your console can't write them to the disc that's already been made.

Most games run directly off of the solid state hard drive in your game console nowadays instead of the rotating disk, because it can render and process data quicker and more efficiently. The game disk comes with the full game but will usually require you to download it to your hard drive for that purpose.

The disk is required after that point for authentication purposes, to ensure that friends and family aren’t passing one disk around for multiple consoles.

If it’s a digital download that you bought from the online store, an internet connection is usually used in place of the disk in order to authenticate every time you boot up the game.

So basically you have to consider which form of media would be more benificial to you for each given game. If it’s a game that you want to be able to play offline whenever you are traveling or your wifi is down, a disk is better. If it’s a multiplayer game that is mostly played online anyways, the digital download is fine is you don’t want to worry about swapping or losing the disk.

Either one is going to take up about the same amount of space on your hard drive.

Yep.

13 years of Steam here and no regrets yet.

Except for all the money I've blown

What game console comes stock with an SSD?

Consoles do not have SSD's in them. That would add at least another 100 bucks to the price tag.

Discs were terrible overall.  So many junked consoles due to bad disc drives.  Scratched, cracked or otherwise broken and defective discs.

I miss cartridges though.

Never liked playstation. Three red rings of death on 360's and I was finished with consoles. Haven't touched one since Halo 4. Strictly PC Master Race.

Are consoles even SSD yet?

Whoops. Thank you for the correction, my shitty brain has wronged me once again.

But either way, consoles have started requiring downloading the full game to the internal drive for some time now for performance reasons, among others.

The problem is what was burned to the disk is 2 dozen patches, updates, and hot fixes out of date come release day.

So while the disk might have 100% of the game it's not 100% of the current game.

Average DVD/BluRay holds about 4-5 gigs of data. So....if a game is 50-60 gigs...

A single-layer disc can hold 25GB. A dual-layer disc can hold 50GB. To ensure that the Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable (future-proof) it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

https://www.dvd-cloner.com/knowledge/how-much-data-can-you-fit-on-a-blu-ray-disc_202.html

OP is an adult who plays video games. This explains quite a bit.

All the physical copies of games I own I can play without ever having to connect to the internet, but the discs still get ripped to the hard drive.

RDR2 came with 2 discs, one was strictly for install.

There has long been talk about selling games on USB sticks...as the price drops on them that gets closer and close to reality.

I still prefer to have a physical copy.  Maybe if we start getting discounts for downloading I'll switch.

USB stick=Modern "cartridge"?   I like that idea.