Starting from 2028 anyone who wants to buy a new PlayStation game will do so without going through a shelf. Sony announced that from January of that year will cease production of physical discs for all new titles released on its consolesfirst party and third parties included. From that moment, the only path for new games will be digital, which means PlayStation Store or, at best, a physical package that only contains a download code. The announcement bears the signature of Sid Shumansenior director of communications at Sony Interactive Entertainment, in a post published on Wednesday 1 July on the PlayStation Blog. The words chosen are reassuring ones, from a company press release, given that we talk about a “natural direction”, of consumer preferences moving towards digital, of an alignment with “how the majority of the community today prefers to access games”. Behind the smooth formula, however, there is the closing of an era that has lasted for more than thirty years, the one that began in 1994 with the first PlayStation and the revolutionary CD-ROMs.
What really changes
The measure only concerns titles not yet released. Everything that has already been released on disc, or that will be released before January 2028, is not touched, so owners of physical collections can rest assured, as well as those waiting for the most anticipated titles for this autumn, such as Marvel’s Wolverine, which Sony explicitly cites as an example of a game that will keep the physical edition. It remains to be seen how sales in stores will work after the deadline. Sony has committed to continuing to ensure a presence in physical stores, but without specifying the form, which could translate into cards with codes, collector’s boxes without playable content, or something else. A model, in reality, already real, given that, for example, Grand Theft Auto 6, released in November, will never have a disc version for PS5, but only digital, or with a code to redeem (present in the case). On online communities, starting with Reddit, the reaction was immediate and furious: thousands of comments against what many define as yet another squeeze on digital ownership, fueled by the very recent precedent of the removal of over 500 films and TV series from PlayStation Store accounts due to the expiry of an agreement with StudioCanal. Several online petitions were also born, one of which collected over 12 thousand verified signatures in the first 24 hours, while a survey by the YouTube channel Digital Foundry exceeded 45 thousand responses, with 86% of users asking Sony to retrace its steps. Sony has not yet responded to questions about the future possibility of making ownership of digital games transferable.
The context
The sector had already given clear signals in this direction. Sony and Microsoft have been selling versions of their consoles without the disc drive since 2020. Nintendo, with Switch 2, introduced “game-key cards”, i.e. physical cartridges that do not contain the game, only access to the download. And according to Phil Spencer, former head of the Xbox division, gaming systems remained “the last consumer electronic device with a built-in player”, an anomaly compared to cinema and music, which have practically abandoned physical media long ago. Then there is an economic variable that weighs more than official declarations, linked to the price of components, and Sony, since last April, has already raised the cost of the PS5 with disc player, from 549.99 to 649.99 dollars, thanks to the increase in memory prices linked to the demand generated by artificial intelligence. Producing an optical reader, with fewer and fewer suppliers and fewer and fewer buyers, costs more than it once did.
What this could mean for PS6
The timing is not coincidental, according to analysts. Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis noted that the choice of January 2028 as the watershed makes it plausible that the next generation PlayStation will not arrive before that date. Sony, for now, neither confirms nor denies anything about the PS6, neither on the timing nor on the possible presence of a disc reader, integrated or external, to guarantee backward compatibility with the PS4 and PS5 games already owned by users. In the meantime, something is moving at Microsoft too: as reported by The Verge, the developers of the Xbox division are testing a function, internally called “Disc2Digital”, which would allow physical games already owned on Xbox One and Series X/S to be converted digitally.
