Sony Announces An End To PlayStation Discs & Everyone Hates It
from the you-own-nothing dept
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.
Filed Under: downloads, ownership, playstation, video games
Companies: sony
Comments on “Sony Announces An End To PlayStation Discs & Everyone Hates It”
Other reporting mentions that Sony’s largest plant producing disks has already spent €30 million on switching production to microlenses.
The timing makes me think that the next Playstation will not have a disc drive.
The only thing I can see changing their mind is if the next Playstation does badly. But that would require the next Xbox to be a strong competitor. Which brings us to the recent layoffs, MS selling off 4 game studios and cutting the budgets of others.
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The Switch 2 is frankly a better system than anything Microsoft or Sony could make.
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Of course, Techdirt has written frequently about Nintendo fucking over its fans. But that’s kind of the same situation: those fans appear to be masochists who’ll at most argue over a few details, while otherwise supporting Nintendo (financially if not vocally, which is just fine for Nintendo).
Steam systems have been getting a lot of publicity lately, with many major computer builders getting into that business. While the hardware, by all accounts, is quite good for gaming (apart from short battery life), Steam itself is a system for digitally-restricted distribution masquerading as “purchasing”; it has all the same problems as Sony’s system, except that it’s not (currently) owned by such a consumer-hostile company.
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I’m not aware of Steam removing purchased games from users libraries, other than cases where the servers were shut down or the purchase involved fraud. Or any other PC storefront.
I’m not sure why that is. Maybe because digital distribution on PC has competition, while consoles lock users into the console companies store.
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Wikipedia says people lose access to all their “purchased” games if they don’t accept whatever the fuck Steam’s owner decides to write in their terms of service. And, already, people lost access to games because some automated system accused them (correctly or not) of cheating; Valve later changed things so they could play offline.
So it’s light bondage for now; but Sony could buy Steam tomorrow, or Gabe could become Lawful Evil, and then what?
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So the standard TOS BS leads to a temporary loss until the user hits agree. That’s going to depend on how well you think the TOS agreement forced upon after purchase you will hold up in court.
Fair point on cheat detection.
Valve changing ownership might be a problem. That’s why I want to know of other stores on PC removing purchased games. Someone is bound to have tried it, how well it went for them tells us how risky it would be for a major store to copy them.
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Maybe. Maybe they’ll also demand the user upload a passport photo, pay a monthly fee, or whatever else they decide. If that won’t hold up in court—and clicking “Agree” didn’t waive the right to use the courts—the (ex-)user might get a ten-dollar check in the mail in the mail a decade later, but probably still won’t have “their” games.
I think what you’re overlooking is that the competition is Sony and Microsoft (and Nintendo to a lesser extent). Their past bullshit didn’t really harm them in the slightest. What would the affected users do? Switch to the greater evil? Even if they did, as above, they still wouldn’t have “their” “purchased” games.
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And it has also moved away from physical media and has made buying used games bannable.
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Not that Xbox would be any better in this hypothetical scenario since it’s rumored their next console, Project Helix will ALSO lack a disc drive.
Also that GTA 6 will not have any physical discs and that’s why Sony is doing this. They know GTA 6 is gonna be a smash hit and they’ll point to it as justification for why they decided to end phsyical discs.
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This may be somewhat pedantic, but from what I can find, M$ is only selling Ninja Theory and Undead Labs. Arkane’s future is unclear, and Double Fine + Compulsion have simply been let go.
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Fair point.
After a bit of searching I see that Double Fine and Compulsion are getting some “runway funding” which, if I understand correctly, means Microsoft is paying them to leave.
I just don’t understand why.
I’m old enough to remember when the whole PS3 / XBOX 360 fight were going on, that Sony kind of won the generation because Microsoft started out by trying to go disc-less. Sony advertised that THEIRS still had a disc drive, and it embarrassed Microsoft so much they reversed course and added one back in.
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That’s the PS4 and XBox One you’re thinking of. MS won the 360/PS3 gen and got the standard delusional thinking of “Well, we can do whatever we want now, where are they going to go, Playstation?”
Yes, as it turned out. And Don Mattrick found himself unceremoniously replaced with Phil Spencer.
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Microsoft went HD-DVD (this stupid format that was supposed to compete with Bluray) on an external disc drive, before switching to Bluray.
Sony also launched the PSP Go, the portable console without UMD, and was one of the worse PlayStation product launch ever, with many retails like Gamestop that refused to sell the console because then could sell any game on it.
Now, at this time, games weren’t +200GB (with day one patches) and could fit on a disk (PS5 only supports 3 layer Bluray disc, so 100GB).
Sony may simply stop producing Bluray game discs because not a AAA game fits on it (Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with all updates and free content is about 600GB on Xbox).
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Apart from the DRM, which being AACS was identical to Bluray (except that HD DVD lacked region-coding), was there anything particularly stupid about HD DVD?
Let’s not forget whose fault that is. Sony was a pioneer in optical media, having developed the compact disc (1982 with Philips), DVD (1996), and Blu-ray (2006). And then they (and everyone else) just gave up on the concept; based on history, we’d otherwise be 1 or 2 generations past Blu-ray by now. The mythical BDXL is said to have a 128 GB capacity; the never-released Holographic Versatile Disc would’ve likely held several terabytes.
13 years ago Sony rightfully threw major shade at XBOX for their decision to implement DRM and prevent disc sharing. Sony even published an instructional video on how to share a used game.. now is the time for XBOX to throw it right back.
Unfortunately
The 20% may be extremely loud and verbal about their dislike for going disc-less. Unfortunately, the 80% are still likely to continue buying and hence Sony won’t worry overmuch about the 20%.
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Especially when ending discs means that Sony gets to keep the money that would have normally been spent on physical distribution. Sony might be able to lose that 20% of customers, lower prices a bit and still have their profits increase.
Lowering prices would be a surprise.
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That’s the clincher for Sony. If killing physical discs improves the bottom line, they really couldn’t give a flying f*** about the 20%-ers.
(Not that they give much of a f*** about the interests of the 80%-ers either, but that’s capitalism for you)
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Though I do have my doubts about how many of the 20% will avoid the next Playstation.
Some will because their internet can’t handle downloading games. Beyond that, video games have a history of people being vocal about boycotting something then buying it anyway.
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Or they might upgrade their connection to one that’s even more unaffordable, or download games on the McDonald’s free wi-fi like those students with school-issued computers who don’t have home internet at all. Sony doesn’t care if their customers are bitching the whole time; people have been doing that since the 1980s.
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Yes. I remember the screenshot of the Modern Warfare 2 boycott.
Re: Clearly not a businessman
Losing 20% of your customer base isn’t an “oh well, never mind” scenario.
You clearly have no understanding of business and shouldn’t be posting about it unless you’re deliberately trying to look stupid.
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It is an “oh well, never mind” scenario if they weren’t making any significant money off those customers in the first place. The profits from physical games were going everywhere except Sony, minus some trivial (on a per-game basis) licensing fees the publishers pay.
Capturing even a small % of customers who switch to digital only pays for that many times over.
Customers != Dollars
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When there’s no real competition, maybe it is. It’s not like Sony’s gonna lose that 20% anyway; many of them will just bitch while forking over their money for something they’ll never own.
As someone else already noted, the Xbox team announced the abandonment of discs long ago. Then they walked it back, but at this point it’s just a matter of which company, Sony or Microsoft, will kill physical media first. It’s already basically dead for PC games (including Steam Decks and Machines), and Nintendo tend to lag behind but will eventually do it.
DLC and such was bad enough. Forced updates are bad enough. (The worst of those are games forcing an OS update – wth?)
We wouldn’t care about physical discs so much (although some ppl really enjoy them for the art, etc.) if y’all weren’t constantly fucking us for what we bought and the ability to back things up.
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Games forcing OS updates is odd when the OS could force them instead.
The only time I can see it being useful for a game to force the OS update is if the console company wants to push it to consoles that normally stay disconnected from the internet. Which, from memory, is how Sony killed the ability to install Linux onto the PS3.
lost faith
i stopped buying games a long time ago! way back then i thought it was stupid to need to be online or have an account just to play a NON-internet game!
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Sony is making a big mistake by removing physical PlayStation discs. Digital downloads are convenient, but they don’t provide true ownership. If a license expires or a service shuts down, players can lose access to games they paid for. Physical copies also help preserve gaming history and give collectors something they actually own.
The gaming industry should focus on giving consumers more choice instead of taking options away. If anyone is interested in gaming discussions, fun entertainment content, and community posts, feel free to visit: https://truthordaresquestion.com
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Silence, clanker.
What do you expect?
Why should there be anything but silence or hatred when removing an option? The customer advantage for consolidating product offerings is quite indirect via the overall health of the company’s finances.
That does not mean it doesn’t exist, but it is rarely tangible enough to garner explicit applause.
If your value/price ratio for 80% of your customers gets dissatisfactory because of catering to 20% of your customers, you’ll not be in a good place unless you specialize on catering to those 20%. But Sony is a mainstream company. They are too big to focus on being a niche player.
Times change
Is this really any different from when Apple removed the floppy disk drive from their computers? Or is it any different from all laptop manufacturers removing CD drives from their computers.
Yes, people got upset, but we all found a way around it.
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That’s not even close to being the same thing. Removing obsolete formats is not the same as purchases that you don’t really own and disappear after to pay for them.
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The difference is that Apple and laptop manufacturers didn’t remove software that users paid for from those machines.
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Huh? Sony’s done that before, but the current story is not about any such plan.
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Yes? The iMac had an optical drive. You could still buy physical media for it. And if you still needed a floppy drive, you could get an external one and connect it via USB.
I feel like you really didn’t think this comparison through.
Can’t help but feel they wouldn’t have gotten quite so much pushbak if they hadn’t one so immediately free pulling films from the libraries of people go believed they’d paid to own them. You don’t immediately do something that requires trust after violating the trust of your audience and expect them to be fine.
This is in no way a defense of Sony (or Microsoft, since they seem to be moving in the same direction), but discs are not the long-term answer. Even the highest capacity blue-rays can’t fit a lot of AAA games completely these days, so some kind of download is still necessary.
Indie games, retro games, and other lo-fi titles that don’t need 8k texture packs will be appropriate for physical distribution for generations, so it’s bad to kill it completely, but it’s still a closed system.
Any closed system with DRM acts as a gatekeeper, whether it’s on a disc or not. Consoles could, theoretically, decide tomorrow that the disc you put in contains a game that is no longer valid to be played on that platform. Physical distribution creates pressure to keep prices reasonable, but not much else.
Only DRM-free, offline storage is good for art preservation and anything resembling true ownership. Consoles haven’t had that in decades.
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This implication is false. Some non-Bluray technology is necessary, but it doesn’t have to be downloading. Ignoring bloat, the reason things can’t fit on today’s discs is that they’re not really today’s discs at all—they’re 2006’s, and then Sony et al. stopped developing the technology.
Had they continued, the newest systems would likely have post-Bluray readers for discs that’d easily store terabyte-sized games. I actually agree that spinning discs are not a long-term technolody, but that’s because of access times. Perhaps stationary discs with moving lasers could work, or there are always the “data crystal”-type experiments like Microsoft’s Project Silica and “5D optical data storage”. Even true (mask) ROM could potentially make a comeback, if people cared, by taking advantage of the last decades of semiconductor and flash media advancement.
Useful context:
This announcement came on the same day as their announcement that the PS3 and PSVita digital stores are being shut down, and a few days after they announced they’re removing access to some legally-purchased movies.
Everyone
That’s strange, I didn’t even know I hated it. Luckily, there are articles like this one to let me know! I feel so angry, now.
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Oh cool, we’re being pedants about what words mean. I’ve got one for you:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/hyperbole
Not everyone, what a stupid take on the issue.
Something that I saw someone on Youtube point out is that most of the indie games on the PS5 are not available on physical disks. Using those to justify ditching disks entirely is at the very least dishonest. What’s the percentage of sales that could be on a disk and aren’t? That’s the important percentage.
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Probably some of those indie games could be on a disk, but aren’t because Sony intentionally make it difficult. For example, their systems won’t play burned discs, DRM is mandatory, and only certain factories are allowed to press the discs (with restrictive terms).
Retro hardware is expensive now!
Getting a retro console now costs the same as they did in the 1990s!
An added bonus if you are too greedy with games they will fall down and hit you on the head and squash you.
Another consideration
There’s another conosideration that most of us really haven’t thought of. With the consistent rumours that Sony is planning a PS handheld to go with the PS6, they’re going to need some sort of “Buy once, play across the PS ecosystem” initiative (see Xbox Play Anywhere). And such an initiative can realistically only be done with digital distribution (unless Sony decides to go with a proprietary game card format ala Nintendo Switch/Switch 2).
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There’s no reason the format would have to be proprietary. And, technically, while it might not be especially convenient, Sony invented the first portable player for full-size discs—in 1984—so something like that wouldn’t exactly be unrealistic.