You’ve probably already heard the news, but if you’ve been living under Havel the Rock, let me give it to you straight: Sony announced recently that beginning in 2028, they will be ceasing the production of Blu-ray discs for new PlayStation 5 games. They’ve clarified that existing games can still have discs reordered, but that’s a small comfort compared to the knowledge that any games coming out after 2027 simply won’t have discs at all. There has naturally been a lot of pushback, including a widely-circulated petition, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. They’ve already begone repurposing their largest disc factory. That’s not the kind of thing you do if you’re not committed to a plan, and it’s not something that can easily be reversed. So, there’s not much that can really be done. Some people are going to stock up on discs while they can. Others are doing the opposite and bracing for an all-digital future by getting a head start. Some others still have decided that if discs won’t be an option, they might as well switch to PC gaming, where discs haven’t been relevant for nearly two decades, suggesting physical games were the only thing attaching them to consoles at all. And before you ask if Microsoft might provide an alternative, their disc releases lately have been glorified license codes, with hardly any data on the disc itself, and recent reports suggest they’re working on a disc-to-digital conversion system that all but confirms disc drives in consoles are going the way of 3.5mm headphone jacks on mobile phones.

Where does that leave us? What are the consequences of this decision going to be? And perhaps more importantly, why now? I’m going to take a look at a few different perspectives and evaluate just how much of a problem the end of disc-based games is going to be through those lenses.

Used Games

This decision will functionally kill used games. There’s really no sugarcoating it. Despite how many people are buying games digitally rather than physically, there are still plenty of used copies of games floating around, suggesting it’s not just collectors buying physical games. And evidently, there are still people buying used games at a discount as opposed to buying new physical or digital copies. There are still a lot of drawbacks to used games, like the risk of buying a damaged and unreadable disc or missing out on included download vouchers. But for enough people, it would seem that’s just not enough of a concern to outweigh the savings from buying a game used. The other end of the equation is just as important. Some people like buying physical games so they can sell them down the road, effectively costing less per game in the long run. It’s easy to see who benefits from cutting this out of the equation. If the only way to buy games is digitally, the only seller is Sony. They’re fully bypassing the perceived problem of used game sales from which they make no revenue (that’s not even 100% accurate, considering a lot of people are going to be buying DLC for their used games, but the numbers start to get a lot more complicated when you think about that). They’re also bypassing the retailers. Aside from the prospect of selling digital download vouchers, and honestly who is going to the store to buy those, retailers are out of options for selling even new games. You can see why this is such a big problem for stores like Video Games Plus and PNP Games (the creators of the aforementioned petition). They’re going to be out of new product to sell before long. Even if they deal in retro games, the sales of new games are likely necessary to keep the business afloat.

Prices

Let’s put aside prices for a minute. Like I said above, digital only means one seller, save for buying a digital code in a box (Take Two Interactive seem to think people will buy those, at least). One seller means one party controlling prices. I hardly think this means games will never be discounted on the PlayStation Store ever again. After all, it’s been shown time and time again that people will buy things that are on sale even if they wouldn’t have bought them otherwise. But without any other players on the field, prices don’t need to be competitive. Some may say that Steam shows steep discounts are still viable in a digital marketplace. This is true, but the context is different. There are technically some competitors to buying games through Steam, but they don’t always make for compelling arguments. The struggle to make Epic Games Store a meaningful competitor illustrates how much PC gamers don’t want to buy games through other services. There are code resellers, but those are often of very dubious provenance and have come under a lot of scrutiny from customers. Some publishers also sell Steam keys on their own stores, but this isn’t terribly common. If anything, the biggest thing keeping Valve in line is piracy. Lots of people are willing to spend a few dollars for the convenience of not needing to go searching for a cracked copy of a game and not needing to run a torrent to download it. That simply isn’t going to be the case with a prospective PlayStation 6. DRM and copy protection have gotten too advanced. So the only thing keeping Sony in line will be how much is being charged on rival platforms and how much consumers are willing to spend. That doesn’t inspire a lot of faith, does it?

Ownership

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Some digital product you purchased is no longer available to you because the license has expired and the seller is no longer allowed to provide that product to you. You almost certainly have heard this one before because it happened quite recently, with a number of films purchased digitally through the PlayStation Store being revoked. Has this ever happened with video games? So far, not quite. Often, even when games are delisted, they remain available for download to anyone who already had that game in their library, they just aren’t available for new purchase. Granted, this depends on the store still being available, but so far, even the Wii Shop Channel, through which new purchases have been discontinued for several years, still allows users to redownload their existing purchases. Sony delivered the disc news at the same time as announcing a plan to gradually phase out the PlayStation Stores for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, although they did indicate that users will be permitted to download the games they already own for the foreseeable future. How reassuring is this? Frankly, not very! But I digress. I’m supposed to be talking about the future, not the past. What kind of games often get delisted? Licensed games, for one. Lots of licensed games ended up unavailable for purchase due to the publishers’ agreements expiring. Scott Pilgrim vs The World was famous for this. A digital-only game that was delisted because Ubisoft didn’t think it was worth it to renegotiate with Universal. It did have a remastered release more recently, likely due to the then-upcoming anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. There was a physical release this time, albeit through Limited Run Games, which feels like a monkey’s paw scenario. If the game had a physical release originally, there wouldn’t have been as much of a problem. I myself recently purchased a copy of the long-delisted Transformers Devastation for PlayStation 4, which is fully playable to this day as long as you’re willing to shell out your hard-earned kromer for it. That simply won’t be the case in the all-digital future. What you will and won’t be allowed to buy will be up the discretion of publishers. But this is only a big deal for licensed games, right? Well, take a look around you. Some of the biggest and most acclaimed games of the last few years have been licensed. That’s not me saying that Baldur’s Gate III or 007 First Light are on the chopping block and you should freak out and buy everything you can right now. But part of why these games are likely safe is because of how successful they’ve been. Imagine if a licensed game, good or otherwise, turned out to be a flop. Maybe it wouldn’t be worth it to renew the license. Or imagine a game that prominently features licensed cars being regarded as obsolete because of its sequel coming out. What I mean to say is that, while Gran Turismo 7 has a physical release, Gran Turismo 8 won’t. So when Gran Turismo 9 comes along (I know this is all way further ahead than anyone can reasonably predict, but play along), Gran Turismo 8 may just disappear into the ether. We’ve seen the Forza Horizon games delisted due to licensing, and those games are hardly fungible. Is anything safe?

Storage

Despite disc-based games still requiring large installations, the installations are not quite as large as they are if you download the entire game. It’s a meaningful difference that informs a lot of people’s decisions. After all, physical games are most popular on the Nintendo Switch, despite the obvious advantages of having multiple games installed on your handheld device, and this is in large part because of how limited storage is on those devices. Home consoles have much more storage available, but SSD prices are starting to go back up after years of coming down. There was a sweet spot, and we’re past it. This, like a lot of things, can be attributed to hyperscaler AI data centers, which provide very little utility but might poison the communities they’re built in. But that’s a topic for another day. The fact of the matter is that storage is going to be more expensive for the PlayStation 6 and unless leaps and bounds are made in engineering game installs, file sizes are going to be a big problem that can’t be mitigated by having a disc.

Availability

The internet is global, but the PlayStation Store is not. Presently, the PlayStation Store is available in 69 countries, a fact that would be nice if not for the fact that there are about 200 countries in the world (what counts as a country is harder to pin down than you may think, so “about 200” is as good an answer as any). For example, South Africa is the only country in Africa where the PlayStation Store is available. Sure, some absences from the list of supported countries are unsurprising, like Iran and North Korea. But even Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, despite being European Union members, are not supported countries. If you live in an unsupported country, you could still play physical games acquired from other regions, but accessing the PlayStation Store will prove to be a much greater challenge. Naturally, that’s about to be the only way.

Backwards Compatibility

It’s as close to a sure thing as you’ll ever find that the PlayStation 6 will be a digital-only console. That means that for those of us who like to buy their games physically rather than digitally, they won’t have a way to play those games on the PlayStation 6, at least not out of the box. One option is to sell a disc-drive add-on, like they did with the PlayStation 5 Pro. Not unthinkable, but not ideal. Another option is to do what Microsoft is allegedly doing, which is a disc-to-digital conversion. The problem with this approach is that I simply don’t see how it’s practicable without using always online DRM. You know, the thing everyone hates and that contributed to the steady decline of the Xbox brand. Let me lay this out for you. As it’s described, the disc-to-digital program will let you convert the games you own physically into a digital license which can then be used on any supported platform. Cool and convenient, right? They also say that you will be allowed to transfer your disc to another user, but that will also transfer the digital license. Perhaps you can see the problem: Any time a disc is inserted, there will need to be a check to verify this disc has not been converted to a digital license. And every time a digital game is booted, there will need to be a check to make sure this digital license hasn’t been transferred. Look, I would love the ability to install my discs and not need to have the disc inserted to play the game. I really would. Especially with all the rumors swirling about there potentially being a new PlayStation handheld alongside their next home console. It would be great if these games could somehow be played on both devices even if I bought it on disc. But I don’t think it’s going to happen in a way that makes people happy.

Preservation

Here’s where I start to dissent from the masses. Lots of people are upset about what this means for preservation, as something distinct from availability and ownership like I was describing above. I hinted at it, but the servers we download our games from aren’t going to be around forever. These same servers also provide patches, and in the present, games are being developed with the expectation that there will be patches down the road, whether for bug fixes or additional content. Think about how many games out there, while technically playable, provide a less than ideal experience if played completely unpatched. Or, think about how many patches added cool features that you would be missing out on. We can leave this up to the publishers, trusting they will at some point issue a “complete” version of their games, but that’s putting a lot of trust in them that they haven’t necessarily earned. Even that has the problem or arguably erasing pre-complete versions of games. Lots of games have changed a lot over their lives, and to many players, they were at their best somewhere in the middle of those lives. When our options are unpatched versus potentially fully patched, we are missing out on a lot of history. Frankly, this is a problem with or without discs, and it’s going to take a lot more effort to solve than people realize. Some people have argued that piracy is the only meaningful preservation right now, and as unfortunate as it is, it’s hard to dispute that. As I mentioned above, piracy is a bigger challenge for consoles than it is for PCs. Perhaps you can see the issue.

Experience

I must yet again dissent. Yes, I like buying games physically as much as anyone else. I have a bunch of games lined up on my shelf and I like looking at them. But I’m also starting to see what’s wrong with that. It’s time to ask yourself: do you like playing games, or do you like the idea of games? It is very true that discontinuing the production of physical media for video games will have negative consequences, as outlined above. But it’s also true that the disc is something of an anachronism as a container for games, and we place value on it as a collectible object sometimes more than we do for the purpose it serves. Or rather, we’ve decided that the purpose it serves is to be owned. Just as many discs have become little more than a license for a digital download in the functional sense, many discs have become little more than collector’s items in the eyes of their owners. Most enthusiasts have been living with this cognitive dissonance for quite some time, I imagine. We know that playing the game is the part that’s supposed to matter, but we’ve assigned value to the physical object of the game, despite that object being increasingly disconnected from playing the game. More and more, games are being installed to internal storage and getting patches and DLC, to the point that the disc isn’t doing a whole lot. But we still want to believe it’s important. And for the reasons I’ve discussed, it is important. But are those reasons the cause for your concern? Or, like me, have you grown up playing games on discs and you’re uneasy about moving on?