This month's PS Plus free game got me thinking – I have a physical copy of WipeOut Omega Collection, and it's installed as such on my PS4. However, with PS Plus making WipeOut available digitally for free, I figured it'll save me disc-swapping time to have it installed as a digital game. Obviously I could just delete the physical version's install and redownload it digitally, but I'm wondering if there's a way to not need to do that.
PS4/PSN – Is Delete and Redownload the Only Way to Convert PS4 Games to Digital?
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Best Answer
You have to delete and redownload
First off, realize that the icon on the home page is just a shortcut, and it points to the
startfile on your game disk. There is nothing you can do to tell the PS4 to now use your digital version. So you need to remove the disc-based startup and install a local-based version.Also, and it varies from game to game, but a good percentage of disc-based games do not put all the data on the hardrive; just the most common/most accessed portions. So even if you could somehow change the startup icon, the code on your harddrive is incomplete and has calls to pull data from the disc. So you would need to overwrite large portions meaning you're downloading the digital version anyways.