from the you-own-nothing dept

Sony Announces An End To PlayStation Discs & Everyone Hates It

Sony just gave the world another lesson in how they don’t actually own the content they’ve bought digitally generally, and particularly not through Sony’s digital storefronts. Instead, as readers here will largely know, what is actually being bought is a temporary license to download and play these games, movies, music, whatever. Sony has done this sort of thing before, disappearing bought items from people’s accounts when licensing agreements expire. Many are surprised to find their shit gone.

This doesn’t happen when you buy physical media, typically, unless it relies on backend servers to operate. But for movies on disc, books on pulp, music on physical media, and physical games this generally isn’t a concern.

But what if a major gaming console maker announced it simply isn’t going to support physical media any longer? Well, that’s precisely what Sony’s PlayStation just did.

Some gamers are concerned about the future of game ownership after Sony’s announcement today that it won’t produce physical discs for PlayStation games as of January 2028. On that date, “new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” Sony said in a blog post.

Ditching discs is “a natural direction” for Sony “to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” the post said.

Now, for some numbers to chew on. The reality is that nearly 80% of PlayStation games are bought digitally these days. This is pretty much a perfect example of companies following the 80/20 rule, where you plan and account for 80% of the reality you face and de-prioritize the 20% of the outliers. If you left it there, this plan might make some sense.

But in this case, that 20% of the market is both a sizable chunk of revenue and almost certainly made up in no small amount of people who will not move to digital purchases instead. There is a very passionate, vocal community who believes in ownership rights that you can’t get currently with digital purchases, or who believes in video game preservation efforts that can’t exist at the pleasure of gaming companies that haven’t shown a ton of interest in the topic.

If you needed proof of that, the backlash online to Sony’s announcement has been ferocious.

For example, the official Sony account on Twitter posted a simple tweet teasing the upcoming release of the next Spider-Man movie with a single spider emoji. Normally, this account gets a few hundred replies at most, but the Spider-Man tweet now has over 3,000 replies, and most of them are from people yelling at Sony for killing PlayStation game discs.

Similarly, over on the official PlayStation Instagram account where most posts get around 200 to 300 replies, the most recent video shared by the company has amassed over 2,000 comments. And once again, most of them are very angry about PlayStation abandoning physical media, begging the company to reconsider, or threatening to boycott future Sony products and games if it doesn’t.

The most recent video on the PlayStation YouTube account, a trailer for a World of Tanks update, has over 300 comments, most of them yelling at Sony over the news. Usually these videos, outside of the biggest trailers, get less than 50 comments.

This has been going on for a week. Somewhat amazingly, Sony has been running with a typical playbook of ignoring the backlash entirely and waiting for it to just go away. The PlayStation ExTwitter account went fully silent for nearly a week after the news broke, which is one more giant middle finger to its own customer base. At the time of this writing, July 7th, the account finally posted again… to pitch a new wireless flight stick. The reaction to that was, well…

In less than an hour, Sony’s fight stick video received over 12,000 negative comments and nearly 4,000 angry quote-tweets. If there is anyone in there defending the company’s move to all-digital, I couldn’t find it. “As was evident, PlayStation has followed the strategy of acting as if nothing had happened,” one fan wrote. “They think we’re going to forget it easily, but we can’t allow that. They’re trying to kill physical games with lies and using us players as an excuse. It’s shameful.”

The level of tone-deaf going on at Sony over all this is fairly astounding. There is no support for ending all physical media on PlayStation consoles. None whatsoever that I can find. There is either silence or hatred.

For ownership rights, for preservation efforts, for collectors, and for many others, this may be a “Give me physical media or fuck all the way off” type scenario. We’ll now have to wait and see if Sony bothers to listen.