Sony is Ending Disc Production: What Does This Mean for Players?
Another day, another defeat for physical media fans everywhere.
On 1st of July 2026, Sony revealed its intentions to end production of physical game discs for PlayStation games in January 2028. From that date, new PlayStation games will only be available in digital formats, including those copies still sold at retailers, which will now come as download codes in a case.
As a physical media fan myself, this announcement — and the decline of physical media in general — is a prospect that fills me with a lot of sadness, and I know I’m not alone. The news has been received with overwhelming negativity from the gaming community, who have flooded the PlayStation Blog and social media with comments complaining about, criticising, or mocking the decision. Even Sony’s Instagram post marketing the upcoming Social Reckoning movie has been besieged by unhappy gamers demanding the policy be reversed. Evidently, many people are not ready to lose discs, and are willing and able to speak up about it. Which begs the question, why would the company make such an unpopular decision?
Well, removing my own sentimentality and thinking from Sony’s perspective, I can see how this would appear to be a good business decision. Sony’s blog post announcing the end of disc production cites the company’s desire to match current “consumer” and “entertainment industry” trends as a primary motive for the decision. Like music, film, and TV, the gaming industry has been making steady progress towards a future dominated by digital downloads and streaming models for years now. Physical copies of games have long been on the decline thanks to the rising popularity of digital downloads. According to Gamespot, PlayStation digital sales made up 80% of all games sold, compared to 10% when the PS4 launched almost a decade ago, while sales of physical games dropped 26% in 2024. Similar statistics are cited for companies like Nintendo and Microsoft.
Sony is not the first to try and reach a digital-only future; it simply made the biggest move. During the launch of the Xbox One in 2013, Microsoft announced that once a game was uploaded to a console from a disc, it would come under the same DRM restrictions as a pure digital download, limiting gamers’ ability to share and resell even if they continued purchasing discs. This was cancelled after pushback, which, ironically, included a mocking video from Sony emphasising the physical discs and easy game sharing for the PS4. Then, just last year, Nintendo released “physical” copies of games for the Switch 2 that did not contain the game’s data on the card, but a keycard which, when put into your Switch, would trigger a digital download of the game. And most recently, Rockstar revealed that the highly anticipated GTA VI would not be available in a physical disc format, with even the most expensive versions simply being a code in a box at retail. None of these moves are as sweeping as Sony’s complete removal of discs, but all point towards an industry that wants to remove physical games from the equation.
One can see the financial benefits of such a move. Going completely digital means cutting costs of production and distribution, as game stores will no longer require a cut of the revenue and the secondhand market will become nonexistent. If you want a breakdown on the napkin math and just how much it could benefit platforms, I’d highly recommend checking out Jason Schreier’s recent video on the topic, which highlights just how much better the revenue share is for Sony on digital goods. Anyone wanting to buy a PlayStation game in 2028 will have to go through Sony, ensuring almost all revenue comes directly back to and through the company.
What I am concerned about is not the companies (the advantages for them are clear) but the gamers and consumers. This decision brings no material benefits to actual people, but it does bring numerous issues and disadvantages. Speaking personally, I have always relied upon secondhand physical copies to play games. Gaming has always been an expensive hobby, and the prices set for games upon release have usually been far too high for me to even think about purchasing on launch. This had its downsides; I was never able to be involved in that initial rush of conversation as everyone plays the game for the first time. But I was always able to play the game at some point, even if it was a few months to a year later.
Under Sony’s digital-only model, those of us who rely on affordable secondhand copies will not have that option. And with the competition of secondhand markets gone, Sony will have few reasons to lower their own prices. In the best-case scenario, the reduced costs of production and lack of profit lost to retailers might convince the company to drop game prices a little or even avoid raising them for a time. But it seems unlikely.
Moreover, the existence of multiple retailers competing on price paired with the secondhand market acts as a strong lever to encourage digital storefronts to put on regular sales. Physical stores will often eat some of the lost profit here.
Time for some economics talk.
Say Sony gets 20% for every copy of a game sold in a physical store. (Note: if the retailer puts that game on sale for 50% off, they still have to give Sony 20% of the original full price, not 20% of the new reduced price.) Sony gets a cut of physical sales, not the full revenue.
So, if a store slashes a game’s price by 50%, and that same game remains full price on the PlayStation Store (which in a modern gaming world, likely means upwards of $80) customers will naturally go out of their way to pick it up in a store where it’s cheaper, meaning that Sony loses even more of revenue during sales. This encourages Sony to hold sales of its own on the digital PlayStation Store as the revenue split is so much better on its own store front. Sony picks up more revenue selling Ghosts of Yotei at half price on its own digital store than a retailer selling that game at 50% off and giving Sony 20% of the full retail price.
The loss of physical discs makes this entire market completely redundant.
Rockstar and Nintendo have both recently made releases in digital-only formats, and both came under fire for the extremely high prices of those games. GTA VI is $80 or $100, and Nintendo’s Mario Kart World was famously the first to break the $80 ceiling. This is a massive affordability and accessibility issue for an industry that already struggles immensely with those things. Late last year, I wrote an article exploring affordability and accessibility barriers in gaming, and they are everywhere. So many people are already on the edge of being able to afford to participate in gaming, and the impact of losing discs will have huge consequences for those on the edge.
There is also the broader issue of media ownership. We live in a world in which, increasingly, media is only ever rented, not owned. Most people access their media through streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Spotify, and such platforms usually reserve the right to remove the media it hosts whenever it wants, whether a consumer has paid for it or not. Sony planted itself firmly within this trend earlier this year, when it removed StudioCanal-distributed movies from the accounts of people who had already bought them, keeping 100% of the profits it earned from the sales with no offer of a refund or an apology. How does game ownership work in a world run on these rules? If Sony shuts down multiplayer game servers, or removes a single-player game from their stores because a license expired, will the people who bought the game lose their ability to play it? And these are not hypothetical scenarios, but things we know can and have happened in the gaming world. Ubisoft has already had to deal with a lawsuit demanding recompense after it removed The Crew from the libraries of players who had already bought it. It spells a nightmare for game preservation, which will be near impossible in a world where no physical copy exists and all ability to maintain the game rests with companies that will prioritise profitability over preservation.
In its announcement, Sony proclaimed that it would continue to “drive innovation” and “provide choices” for where “players prefer to purchase new games.” But I fail to see any kind of innovation or choice in this decision. Digital downloads have been an option for gamers for years now. In the wake of this decision, players who favour digital copies will merely continue as they always have. At best (or worst), Sony could look to implement digital rental schemes where you have even less ownership of the goods, and the platform holders could make even more revenue off players. But for those of us who prefer physical copies, the move to end disc production forcibly limits our ability to choose how we play games we love and potentially removes the ability to afford them at all. Far from providing choices, Sony is actively removing a choice from 20% of its player base, and there is no guarantee all those people will be able to move to purchasing digital copies, even if they might want to. It is worth remembering that even in 2026, there are large parts of the world where people have to deal with aggressive data caps and extremely slow internet speeds. And, looking at the list of countries that PlayStation’s Marvel Tokon won’t be playable in because PSN doesn’t work there (on both console and PC), it's not like Sony itself is making digital ownership viable for all players.
The only real beneficiaries of this move are Sony themselves. In Sony’s February financial results presentation, CFO Lin Tao stated that the company’s focus moving forward would be growth, specifically via the increased monetisation of their “installed base” and their “growing software and network services revenue”. Reading between the lines, this does not suggest that increased accessibility for a wider player base is any kind of priority for Sony at the moment. Instead, they want to get more money out of the players they already have.
Though this move appears more definite than previous attempts, I still have hope. The returning popularity of Vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and the failure of the Kindle to replace the physical novel all show that there is an appetite for physical media. And there is proof of it within the gaming industry as well. According to The Game Business, statistics show that in 2025 single-player, story-driven games like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Spider-Man 2, and Resident Evil 4 saw 50% of their sales go to physical copies. This, and the sheer amount of outrage generated by Sony’s decision to cut physical discs, is evidence that there is a market for physical games.
Physical copies of games are more than just another format to play them on. They represent the ability to own the media we love, and the only viable way for a not insignificant number of people to engage with the art form. They are anticipated trips to the game store, unwrapping a present on Christmas Day as a child and playing it with the person who bought it for you, or bringing a multiplayer title over to a mate’s house. For some people, secondhand and new physical copies are their only realistic means of gaming at all. The idea that a child growing up ten years from now will be deprived of all those experiences is a truly heartbreaking thought. That the world might lose its ability to preserve its gaming history is not a future I want to witness. Physical game discs are important, and their loss can only ever deprive gamers. It provides nothing beneficial. Not to us, at least.
