Sony’s announcement that it will end production of all PlayStation game discs in 2028 hasn’t gone over well with fans of physical media. While the move might be an obvious one to make for Sony–digital sales account for almost 80% of its game sales on PS5 currently–the news still feels like it came from out of nowhere.
Coupled with Sony also confirming that it’ll be closing the PS3 and PS Vita storefronts next month, today feels like a solid reminder that you don’t own the game you just bought, merely a license to play it on that specific platform.
This will have a major ripple effect across the industry, as physical retailers like GameStop have long made their bread and butter on physical sales, both new and secondhand. Then you have people who swap games with each other or who prefer to obtain a tangible copy of a game so that they can feel some sense of ownership over it, or the consumers who don’t trust a company to keep the servers online forever–an idea that feels especially relevant in light of Sony delisting hundreds of digital movies from PlayStation user libraries last week.
Naturally, people have a lot to say about the shift to digital, and how it feels like the latest addition to a seemingly never-ending cycle of bad news.
Lately, things feel glum in the gaming industry. Alongside Sony’s future plans–which suggest the PS6 being a digital-only gaming console–Rockstar has also come under fire for its GTA 6 code-in-a-box plans, Microsoft is reportedly planning to close down several of its game studios, and an Xbox console is more expensive than ever before. But hey! At least you can get some PC games for cheap right now and use them to ignore the dismal state of things.