It could be that Walmart was planning to start winding down physical game sales and made that clear to Microsoft, but Microsoft made a deal to foot the bill for extra inventory to keep supply available during the holidays. Even with packaging and distribution, the actual cost per game to Microsoft isn't really that high.
They also straight up refuse to discount anything meaningfully ever. And actively harass anyone streaming gameplay of their games without their permission, and are extremely litigious about emulation that's clearly established as perfectly legal, among a bunch of other shit.
Fuck the always online shit, but since last time I played they added a rogue lite mode. "Just kill randomly selected NPCs on existing maps" doesn't sound mind blowing (and occasionally a level feels kind of trivial), but the "die and they're on alert, die again and start over without your gear" format combined with limited access to gear really does give a fresh, high stakes feel.
An SSD on PC is definitely a step up from anything before this gen.
This gen (at least PS5, which leans hard into the tech with hardware decompression on top of the silly raw speed of the drives) is better than PC, though (for now). The hardware you're buying now can do pretty much everything the PS5 hardware can, but because the software stack to use it isn't the same and universal, there's definitely more loads. It's similar to how PS4 games load fast (especially compared to on the actual PS4), but get blown out of the water by PS5 games. I die in Horizon: Zero Dawn, it's 5-10 seconds. Which is fine. But I die in Forbidden West, which is prettier and has more complexity (mechanically and the environment) and it's maybe a second.
It's worth it just for my PS4 library not punishing me with a ten minute wait every time I die. The loading entirely changes the experience and enables punishing gameplay to be far less frustrating, in the same way Celeste can have harder sequences and be less annoying than something like Mario at the same time.
I had a lot of games on PS4 where the difficulty isn't "why" I stopped, but the lengthy loads when I died was.
I'm perfectly happy dying a bunch of times in a row, provided the deaths are fair and consistent. I have a big issue with waiting 5-10 minutes to replay a section that doesn't last meaningfully longer than that.
Getting a PS5 let me go back to a lot of those games and properly enjoy the brutal difficulty without the headaches.
They didn't say piracy is good. They said piracy is (by a massive amount) less malicious and less harmful than buying from fences for stolen keys like all the disgusting sites you're promoting.