PlayStation fans are continuing to rake Sony over the coals for its plan to end disc production in 2028, around the same time the PS6 launches. The current battleground is the YouTube comment section beneath the newest trailer for Marvel’s Wolverine. It was posted less than two days ago and already has over 10,000 comments praising physical games.
“Wolverine’s treasured photograph shows the significance of physical media,” reads one top comment with thousands of likes. “Wolverine going mad over the loss of a physical photo is quite the choice for a trailer at the moment,” reads another. While fans are angry about Sony’s decision, they are clearly having fun roasting it. “Wolverine was really getting PHYSICAL in this trailer, he has such a DISCtinct presence,” reads a third popular comment.
The comments are surprisingly civil, but good luck finding any that aren’t about Sony’s biggest optics fumble in over a decade. The latest Wolverine trailer has yet to break 1 million views. Previous Wolverine videos from Sony have only cracked 20,000 comments after nearing 10 million views. We’ll have to wait a little longer to see if the Ain’t No Hero cinematic story trailer ends up going down as Sony’s most ratio’d YouTube video in recent memory, or is just another flash in the pan of the ongoing player backlash.
So far at least, Sony seems perfectly happy to soak in the bad vibes and wait for the controversy to play itself out. “Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users,” Japanese game industry consultant Dr. Serkan Toto told IGN recently. “Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let’s say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1 percent of that business gone — of course not enough for Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative.”
Angry players hurting Sony in its pocketbook seems unlikely. The online boycott already faltered in the face of popular Black Ops ports earlier this month. But the death of physical PlayStation games isn’t happening until 2028. Even then, publishers of existing games can continue to have new disc copies printed for the foreseeable future. Where does that leave the current backlash? 18 months is a long time to flood PlayStation’s social channels with blowback. But it’s also a long time for the publisher to deal with all the noise.
Every new video, tweet, blog post, and showcase being dominated by the fight for physical games comes with a cost too, even if it’s not as easy to quantify on a spreadsheet. Maybe Sony will end up finding a way to split the baby, letting publishers continue to get new games on PS5 discs while keeping the PS6 digital only. Or maybe Sony, who has seemingly been content to retreat further and further into a locked-down community and communications strategy, will just grin and bear it.