The Whole Industry Is Doing This. Sony's Just Doing It Loudest.

Starting January 2028, if you buy a new PlayStation game, there won't be a disc option. Sony confirmed it on the PlayStation Blog on the 1st of July: physical disc production for new releases stops, and everything after that date goes through the PlayStation Store or nowhere. Games already out, or already scheduled before the cutoff, aren't affected. Everything after it is digital or it doesn't exist.

Sony's line is that this is just where customers were already heading, and they're simply following. Digital sales dwarf physical for them now, and GameStop's shed well over a thousand stores in the last couple of years while it's been happening. Fine. Most people already buy digital, I'm not going to pretend that number's made up. But it's worth being honest about what this is before getting into why it's Sony specifically that's got me angry: this isn't one company reacting to its own numbers. This is the entire industry making the same call within days of each other, and Sony just happened to go first and say it out loud.

Nobody Else Waited Long Enough to Look Independent

The timing here isn't subtle. The same day Sony declared physical dead, Microsoft was reported to be testing its own disc-to-digital scheme for Xbox One and Series consoles – install from the disc once, and the disc becomes irrelevant afterwards, because the "ownership" was only ever the licence underneath it. Xbox has reportedly got a whole next-generation project, internally called Helix, built around going disc-free entirely. About two in three Xbox Series consoles already sell without a drive fitted. Nobody had to twist Microsoft's arm. They'd clearly been sat on the plan, waiting for someone else to go first and take the headline, and Sony obliged.

Even Nintendo, the one company that's spent the last two years being held up as the last adult in the room, isn't as clean as the framing suggests. A chunk of Switch 2's library already ships as Game-Key Cards: a cartridge with a box and a case and nothing on it but a licence key, so you're buying the shelf presence of a physical game and the actual rights of a digital one, at physical prices. Developers are already saying the quiet part out loud – one Final Fantasy VII director called the shift "part of a larger trend we can't avoid," which is exactly the kind of sentence that gets said right before the trend finishes arriving. Nintendo's holding the line for now because Nintendo can afford to, not because Nintendo's principled about it in a way the other two aren't. Give it one more console generation.

So no, this isn't really a story about Sony discovering digital is popular. It's three companies that compete on almost nothing else quietly agreeing, at the same time, that the one part of the business where you got to fully own what you bought was the part worth removing. Nobody landed on that by accident. It's what happens when an industry works out it can get away with the same thing all at once, because there's no rival left to switch to who isn't doing it too.

Which Is Exactly Why Sony Doesn't Get to Hide in the Crowd

An industry-wide shift is still made up of individual companies making individual choices, and Sony's choices, on their own record, are worse than the other two's. Xbox is at least building a disc-to-digital tool that lets people keep what they already bought in some usable form. Nintendo is still shipping full carts for plenty of its own big titles and clearly flinching at the backlash to the Key Cards it has done. Sony's just announced it's stopping outright, on a timer, with nothing offered in its place, from a company that has spent a long time proving it can't be trusted with what's left once the physical option's gone.

I should say upfront: I wasn't a PlayStation kid. I was born in 2005, and the console under my TV growing up was a Wii, then a Wii U, then a 3DS in my pocket. I didn't own a PlayStation for any of what's below, and I've still got that Wii U – hacked to run Aroma now rather than sat gathering dust, which is its own small argument for owning hardware outright instead of renting a licence, but that's a different post. None of what follows is me remembering anything. It's on the record whether I was there for it or not.

Start with Other OS. The PS3 launched advertising, on the box, that you could install Linux on it. People bought it partly for that. The US Air Force built a supercomputer cluster out of 1,760 of them. Then in March 2010, firmware 3.21 ripped the feature out for every console that had it, whether you'd ever touched it or not, because someone had used it as a route to jailbreak the machine. Sony didn't patch the exploit. They deleted an advertised feature off hardware people had already paid for, and when the class-action lawsuit turned up, they eventually settled rather than defend it in court.

The following year, the PSN hack: April 2011, an intrusion took the whole network down for twenty-three days and walked off with personal data from 77 million accounts, credit card details among them for about ten million of those. Sony didn't tell anyone for a week after they noticed. When the apology came, it was three executives bowing on camera in Tokyo, which doesn't put a single stolen card number back where it was. The compensation for having your data taken was a month of free PlayStation Plus and a couple of downloadable games. Costs Sony almost nothing, sounds like something on a press release. That's not an apology. That's a coupon.

Since then it's mostly been a drip rather than another single scandal. PlayStation Plus got split into Essential, Extra, and Premium specifically to push more people up the price ladder – Sony's own investor language talks about pricing and tier mix as levers for profit, not as anything to do with what players get. The PS5 shipped with a disc drive as standard, and every year since has nudged people away from it: the Digital Edition, then the PS5 Pro with no drive at all, then a straight price hike on the disc console this year, from £479 to £549. And then there was Helldivers 2 – a PC game, on Steam, that Sony tried to make mandatory-locked to a PSN account after the fact, in a hundred and seventy-odd countries where PSN doesn't even legally operate, purely so it could count more accounts on its own books. It took a weekend of review-bombing and boycotts to make them back down, and they only backed down because the money started moving, not because anyone at Sony decided forcing an account onto people who'd already paid was wrong.

Then this year, days either side of the disc announcement, two more. Sony pulled hundreds of purchased Studio Canal films and shows out of people's libraries because a licence lapsed – paid for, gone, because a contract between two companies expired and the person who'd actually bought the thing had no say in it whatsoever. And Grand Theft Auto VI's "physical" edition turned out to be a disc-shaped box with nothing in it but a download code. Not a disc. A box, and a promise the servers stay up.

Every company in this industry is walking towards the same digital-only future right now. Only one of them has an eighteen-year paper trail of what it does with you once you've got nowhere else to go.

The Developer Side of This Is Just as Bad

I'm a software developer, self-taught, out of college this summer and currently looking for actual paid work doing this. Game development has always been somewhere in the back of my head as a direction I could end up going – not a firm plan, just a door I've wanted to keep open. Announcements like this one are what quietly close it.

If I build something for PlayStation from January 2028 onwards, I'm not shipping a product any more. I'm shipping a licence into a storefront one company fully controls, where they set the cut, set the visibility, and can pull the whole thing off the shelf the moment a platform decision makes it inconvenient, the same way they've just pulled paid-for films out of other people's libraries over a lapsed contract. I wouldn't be signing up for some hypothetical risk, either. It's the exact same risk Sony's own customers are living through right now, just moved one layer down the supply chain to the people making the things in the first place. Building for a platform that's shown you, repeatedly, how little it cares about what happens to something once it's out the door isn't a great pitch to make to yourself before you've even started.

And Consumers Already Know Where This Ends

None of this is landing on a public that hasn't noticed the pattern. Piracy never actually went away, it just went quiet for a stretch while streaming and digital storefronts made legitimate access genuinely convenient. That truce only ever held because the convenience came with an unspoken promise: pay for it and it stays yours to use. Every delisted show, every server shutdown, every licence quietly left to lapse is Sony and everyone like it breaking that promise one purchase at a time, and MUSO's own tracking still puts pirate-site traffic in the hundreds of billions of visits a year even with the truce mostly holding. Break that truce hard enough and there's nowhere for people to go that isn't backwards.

The Video Game History Foundation's already been saying the quiet part in public since the announcement: physical media was never the reliable way to preserve a game long-term, given how much gets patched and altered after launch anyway, and once digital-only storefronts are the only copy of something that exists, piracy stops being a moral grey area for a lot of people and starts being the only functioning archive left. I'm not going to pretend I think piracy is some noble act. But I understand completely why someone who's just watched their paid-for library get quietly edited by a company they trusted is going to stop feeling bad about it. Sony didn't create piracy. They're just doing an excellent job of making it feel like the only honest option left.

The Bit the Blog Post Left Out

A disc is a physical object. You own it the way you own a book: you can sell it, lend it, hand it down, or leave it on a shelf for a decade and it still works exactly the way it did the day you bought it. Nobody can walk into your house and take it.

A digital licence isn't ownership. It's permission, and permission belongs to whoever granted it, revocable whenever the balance sheet says so. Servers shut down and the multiplayer game you paid full price for stops existing, permanently, nothing left behind. Storefronts close and the thing you bought becomes undownloadable the day your hard drive dies. Licences lapse, as they just did for a few hundred Studio Canal customers, and the thing you were told you owned simply isn't there any more. A disc doesn't care about any of that. This is true of Xbox's version of this future and Nintendo's too, eventually – but Sony is the one who's shown its hand most clearly about what it does with that kind of leverage the moment nobody's watching.

"Natural Direction" Is Doing a Lot of Work in That Sentence

If digital really was simply where everyone wanted to be, none of these three companies would need to actively remove the alternative. People would just stop buying discs on their own, which is largely what's already happened. You don't need to ban the option people have abandoned. You need to ban the option enough people are still stubbornly choosing that it's cutting into margin. That remaining slice of physical sales is still a huge number of paying customers across every platform who are about to be told their preference doesn't exist any more, in language built to make it sound like their idea rather than the industry's.

The actual reason is the one that doesn't poll as well: no manufacturing, no distribution, no shelf space to negotiate for, no GameStop or CEX taking a cut on a used sale the publisher never sees a penny of. Digital-only isn't a response to what customers want. It's the removal of the one format that let a customer do anything with a purchase that didn't put more money straight back into the publisher's pocket. Sony's just the one willing to say it with a firm date attached.

I've Already Made This Exact Move – Just Not Towards Them

I moved off PlayStation and onto Steam around 2024, and I bring it up because it proves digital-only doesn't automatically mean this. It can mean Sony, or Xbox building the same future with slightly better manners, or a company that's actually earned the trust it's asking for.

Valve has never delisted something out of my library. Refunds work without a fight. Modding, workshops, actually letting people do things with what they've bought instead of just consuming it passively – that's the default there, not a favour. I've never once felt like Steam was a landlord who happened to also sell me the flat. Sony, meanwhile, has spent from Other OS through Helldivers 2 to Studio Canal proving it'll take things back the instant it's convenient, in an industry that's about to make that the only kind of relationship on offer everywhere else too.

What "Owning a Game" Means After 2028

Once every new release from any of the big three only exists as a licence in someone else's store, that company sets the price, decides what the licence permits, and decides whether you keep access to what you've already paid for. I'm not being paranoid about any one company here. That's simply what a licence is, industry-wide, once there's no disc left to fall back on.

I don't think Sony's lying about the sales numbers, and I don't think Microsoft or Nintendo are either – digital genuinely is most of the business now, everywhere. What's dishonest is the framing, used by all three but sharpest from Sony: pointing at how many people already chose digital to justify removing the choice for everyone who didn't, from a company with a near-twenty-year track record of doing exactly that the moment it stopped being profitable to leave you alone. Discs were never just a format preference. They were the one part of buying a game that didn't require trusting a publisher indefinitely. From January 2028, PlayStation loses that first, out of the big three, and it's losing it at the hands of the one company that's given you the least reason to think it'll behave once it's the only option left.