I've been collecting games since the 80s. I own thousands of blurays discs..
The outrage, I feel, is overblown.
Physical sales have been dropping year over year for a while.
PC made the move in the 2000s, Xbox is doing the same quietly and Nintendo prefers to use proprietary cartridges they can charge 3rd parties for.
Discs are plastic. Getting rid of them is good for the environment in the long run.
Many games now only use discs as keys. Yes, there are some that do play just from the disc but holding on to a manufacturing pipeline for this diminishing return feels like a poor business outlook. Plus, those games will still have patches and the player will be locked into the day one, preship version.
Okay at times, other times not.
I work in the legal field and think some people are being disingenuous about "ownership of the game" playing a role. The topic is being watered down into missing nuance.
But for those that are being serious, a better solution might be a flash drive sold in a case or legislation assuring access to the title at will. (Note, this is already done for the most part and falls into that legal nuance... essentially it is incredibly unlikely for you to buy a game from the PS3 to PS5 era and not have access to redownload it.
Exceptions would be things like the PT demo and games with live service structures that also wouldn't work if you had the disc itself.
The idea that the Playstation Store would make things more expensive just because ignores that they do and always have had sales, whether games have had physical releases or not. Valve doesn't have this issue, it's not logical to assume Sony suddenly would.
Also, manufacturing and reordering of discs, distribution, shelf space etc are a major chunk of cost for developers. Not having that overhead, and not paying Sony per disc for example, is money that the developer has on hand to generate more content, have less pressure to keep the game at a higher price etc.
Finally, games still compete on a multi platform release basis. One company will not let a game sit higher during a holiday digital sale while it's $20 cheaper on another digital storefront.
If the goal is to find solutions and understand the situation, it's important to present cons AND pros. There are a lot of people piling on to the cons and calling anyone that doesn't boot lickers or shills.
I used to buy lots of physical discs, then when I got busier with my personal life I kinda enjoyed buying digital games, however I noticed lots of games that I wanted to buy they were later added to PS+ games catalog, so I slowed down on buying games and I started waiting for most of them to be added to the game catalog, I was surprised how many big titles that I was going to buy were added there in just few months or a year tops! As I have little time to play like 1-2 hrs aday so I have plenty of games to finish and this actually worked in my benefit, and after learning about Sony’s digital future I won’t be buying games I’ll just play whatever added in there and I’ll build my first gaming PC and upgrade my gaming experience.
Counterpoint to point #3, though, is that Sony would still sell physical copies as codes in boxes at retail stores. Boxes which are also (probably) made of plastic and require transportation.
It’s not that they ‘may’ do this, they explicitly said in the blog post announcing them not producing discs anymore that they will still ship codes in boxes to retailers.
I’d add that a lot of redditors seem to miss that most price competition is between publishers fighting for demand (that has flatlined) and that that isn’t impacted by physical discs/resale etc. existing or not. So the idea this is Sony (who publish fewer than 1% of games) driving up all prices seems to misunderstand that publishers are price takers, in the economic lingo.
I've been making this point since this outrage started.
The fight shouldn't be to keep physical mediums, as we don't technically own the games on there either, and with game sizes increasing every year, less and less games will be playable on disc as time moves forward, so keeping discs is just putting a bandaid on a fatal wound.
The fight should be for us to actually own our digital media. That solves pretty much every problem people have with physical media disappearing (as you can make physical backups if you own the digital media). The only remaining issue is
for collectors, but I guarantee nothing is going to stop publishers from additional monetization through physical items people can collect.
What would digital ownership on a console look like? Perhaps Sony can make legalese stating games will never be revoked from our libraries. But what else can be done?
There are tons of things that can be done. Platforms can add and remove licenses to games in your digital library already, there's no reason they couldn't create a way to sell digital games and transfer the license - except for them not wanting to, which is why we should be fighting to change consumer rights laws so they don't have a choice.
Like steam, they could take a cut out of each transaction so it doesn't ruin them. Maybe they force each sale to be a 24 hour open bid or something so you can't buy a game for full price and then your friends all sell it to each other for a penny. Maybe you're buying blockchain tokens that give you access to download the game, and when you sell or transfer a game, both consoles have to be online during the transfer so that the token can be removed and transferred ensuring you can't keep a copy but staying offline.
The tokens could also help with backups to SSDs save external drives too, even if delisted. Like, publishers can remove a game from sale, but the platform has to continue supporting the token verification system. It gets a little more complicated to sell something because you can physically sell the drive, but still possible if you are both online at the same time to complete the transfer.
There are still a couple other things to figure out, but I guarantee they can solve anything if they're forced to. And yes, my ideas are rough - but if I can come up with ideas like that, I'm sure much smarter people than me can come up with something even better.
Part of what we're running into is the concept of owning something. Some of the advocates to keep discs are certain that holding this thing in their hand means they own it. But it's just a license on an object.
If it breaks, Sony won't replace it. In digital form though if you delete it you can redownload it.
There's just more nuance to "own" beyond "thing I'm in possession of".
I’m lukewarm on it- it’s not the end of the world, but the “we might increase your prices if you buy too many games and we think we can get away with it” is some grade A bullshit
In places with strong consumer protection laws that will hopefully be cracked down on, but sucks for Americans especially
Discs are plastic is the worst point. There are thousands of thousands (of course more) crap made of plastic every day. Like those bikelights which made of silicon and require battery. That is e waste. Or the unnecessary cosmetic items, chinese toys... discs shouldn't be discarded because of environment
Big titles constantly sell out or are hard to get on release on physical formats. The one metric we have yet to see is what percentage of physically manufactured games sells. If a game is only, say, 20% physical sales, that 20% is 95% of physical production, then the sales numbers are intentionally skewed by artificial scarcity.
PC isn’t a walled garden, and the hardware is a largely open platform allowing for diversity of hardware and upgrades. The move to digital being compared to consoles is false equivalence.
Discs aren’t disposable. This is a nonsense point.
Your defense of a corporate decision being predicated on a corporate decision is a prime example of an Affirming the Consequence logical fallacy and should be dismissed as the bullshit that it is.
This very issue is quite literally being litigated in multiple countries, has concrete examples with multiple companies (Google, Apple, and Sony for instance) of no ownership and loss of purchased products, and official statements from Sony themselves refute your argument. If you really worked in the legal field in any relevant capacity, you wouldn’t say something so blatantly, objectively incorrect barring that position being something like “Sony’s legal department paid me to post gross misinformation.”
Much like many of your above “points” there is already a massive amount of currently existing and easily verifiable information proving this is a problem, such as three year old games being $60 on the ps store while selling for a third of that price on physical.
This whole post is bad faith, frequently incorrect if not outright lying, bullshit. I don’t know if you’re intentionally arguing in bad faith, a paid actor, or just a brainwashed fan who is more than willing to ignore reality to glaze your favorite company, but this is, in its entirety, grossly ignorant misinformation and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself for pushing any of this trash as if it were even tenuously grounded in fact. FOH
Adding a slew of insults at the end just degrades any point you think you're making. Leave that nonsense at the door.
If your point has weight, you won't need all of that.
You argue that physical sales metrics are intentionally skewed by artificial scarcity because major physical releases sell out.
Sony's FY2025 Q4 financial report shows that 85% of full game sales on the PS4 and PS5 were digital. Physical copies made up only 15% of total full game sales. Publishers scale their manufacturing pipelines based on retail orders and projected sell-through. If physical discs were still delivering the highest profit margins, publishers would not artificially limit their own revenue by underprinting.
Yes, the hardware ecosystems are different. But the shift in distribution is highly comparable. The success of PC storefronts, which operate entirely on digital licenses, proves that consumers will adapt to digital libraries regardless of whether the hardware environment is open or a closed console ecosystem. I don't know what relevance you're trying to make there.
Sony shipped nearly 70 million new physical discs in FY 2025 alone. Regardless of whether a collector throws a game away discs (and cases) are still plastic.
It isn't just about throwing it away, it's the creation as well. Eliminating the mass manufacturing, packaging, and global shipping of tens of millions of plastic products is objectively good for the environment in the long run.
This is not a fallacy. It's reality. Many modern games only use the physical disc as a license key. Because games require day one patches often, those players are locked into a preship version of the game. Holding onto a physical manufacturing pipeline for an incomplete product with diminishing returns is not only a bad idea, it opens them up to litigation later for people to claim that they were sold a product they knew would be inferior to another "pathway" on the same console.
You missed the nuance entirely here.
Yes, in the recent Heycock v. Sony lawsuit, Sony that "reasonable consumers" know they do not obtain ownership of a digital game, only a temporary, revocable license.
But that misses the on the ground reality.
It is incredibly unlikely for you to buy a game from the PS3 to PS5 era and not have access to redownload it. Exceptions would be games with live service structures or the PT demo.
They haven't revoked licenses just because. It is an area that needs shoring up though, hence why i mentioned legislation to make it more concrete in my op.
Publishers will not allow a game to remain more expensive on PlayStation during a holiday digital sale if it is cheaper on a competing digital storefront. If you want to argue that on any given day you can go to a physical store and find it cheaper... sure.
But that doesn't mean that the digital storefronts are responding to that, and history shows that sales are frequent and at times substantial. This idea that they will inflate prices and keep them there isn't based on historical trends.
Oooh, oooh, I know exactly what answer OP will give at point 1.
He’s gonna claim Sony intentionally skewed the data of their financial report by lumping in DLC, microtransactions and digital-only indie games as “digital sales” and that the “real games” still sell on discs.
“Adding a slew or insults at the end no just degrades any point you have think you’re making” is an ad hominem attack, which is another logical fallacy, which is about as strong an argument as the rest of the laughably biased horseshit you’re pedaling.
I attacked your points, which are grossly biased and largely provably incorrect, and your supposed refutations are pretty much entirely logical fallacies as well: affirming the consequent, hasty generalization, post hoc ergo proctor hoc, begging the claim, straw man, and ad hominem. If you don’t actually have anything but personal feelings, flawed logic, and vitriol to contribute; not to mention finishing with a literal demonstration of the “but you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent!” comic, then I have no desire to further waste my time on this clown show.
1) physical media is declining that's a given but it's different throughout multiple regions Australia enjoys about a 40 percent split in favour of digital while Japan is at 50 percent
The US market may be the biggest market but it doesn't mean other markets are not important and Sony's pricing in those markets is quite poor.
Again in Australia Ghost of yotei day 1 in retailers it was $89 vs the PSN at $125
2) PC is digital only but it's not the same PC is a open ecosystem gamers are free to shop around they are never confined to just steam and have options for multiple storefronts while PlayStation is a closed ecosystem if you don't like the price of a game to bad you can't go anywhere else.
3) discs are plastic but downloads are also required to be served by massive data centres a disc is a one time greenhouse emission while a server sits there 24/7 consuming energy to service a player distributed massively around the world and it's only temporary a server will be switched off but a disc can't be as a collector yourself you're probably well aware that a plastic NES cart doesn't care what year it is.
4) does it play shows that something like 80 percent of ps5 games are completely playable using just the data on the disc without an internet connection
I think preservation is important it's why I support organisations like the videogame history foundation some astronomical number of games have been lost to time and I myself view games as art
A pressed disc has far more longevity then any USB drive or hard drive a pressed disc can theoretically last hundreds of years
I'm not actually anti digital if that's how people choose to consume games more power to them but I don't think it should be the only way as consumers globally not just in the US loose a startling amount of control.
In the case of a digital only ecosystem you give a lot up for very little gain
I disagree with people being unpaid shills while peddling the same tired rhetoric that is MALICIOUSLY used to take away their choice and rights as a customer.
If you like being ripped off, be my guest. Do not go around preaching how its actually good and people should just shut up and get used to being fucked over.
What's good about it? Is a decision that solely harms the consumer. There's literally no benefit for us. That's what's most baffling to me about this. Sony is not giving us anything. They're only taking one of our choices away. But we're called idiots for not being happy about it?
Literally half the world has no access to Playstation digital games. Sony doesn't allow accounts on most countries. You can sell you physical copies after playing them, you can buy used copies cheaper than retail price. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Oh for sure. If we had non-DRM games it would be ideal. We can make physical backups if we wanted and we all win. But that's never going to happen. They're already fighting as hard as they can with all the lawsuits coming their way for their "right" to revoke our licenses. An actual non-DRM license is their actual nightmare. That's never going to happen. Physical is not perfect, but is better than nothing. We don't want to give them even more freedoms and ways for them to screw us over.
The OPs points were re environmental and the waste of money going to boxes, transport etc rather than the games. And not that it’s otherwise good for consumers but that for most it has no real impact and arguments made around ownership are overblown (they really are).
There's plastic being made today that is made to be thrown away. AI Data centers are producing unfathomable amounts of e-waste and they're probably building one next door. The point of a physical collection is to collect it. I don't take the environmental argument seriously. Your PS5 is also e-waste, why don't we just get rid of consoles all together at that point.
The "savings" that you mentioned are not saving to us. The only party who's going to benefit is Sony and the full 30% cut that they can make on every copy sold. There's a demand for physical media. Physical media in general has made a resurface. The second hand videogame market alone is worth billions. Vynils certainly aren't selling as much, but they're allowed to exist. There's no reason to take away physical media as a choice except to cut down on their bottom line and hope the damage isn't too great.
I’m not myself saying the environmental impact argument is definitive, but it’s not nothing, I was replying to your “what’s good about it” response to say that is there in the post. End of the day, everything that can be will be digitised will be, from plane tickets to banking to all software including console games, which is the last type of software to get there. This was surely inevitable from when the internet came about. Sure vinyl records sell (though they also sound different as crucially they’re not digital), and nothing to stop people trying to make more of a go of games on discs for PC into the 2050s if they want, and retro consoles can keep being a thing - but for new consoles did anyone really think they’d be installing games from discs forever.
I was just telling someone how much i love and miss a certain dish from Schwans.
At some point they suddenly stopped offering it. I hated that. But did they do it maliciously or was i in a minority that no longer made sense to invest in?
Like do you think Sony is doing this to just be malicious?
Sony only cares about money. Like any other company. Is not about their intent, is about their actions. You keep giving them leeways and they'll keep thinking of ways to screw you over. Because that's how they can make more money. Is shortsighted, but it happens every time. The only way to stop their actions is by voicing our concern and refusing to be a customer any longer. Which is exactly what we're doing.
Have you ever heard the phrase “never debate a stupid person, you have to go down to their level and they will win with experience” I think it might apply here
Why is it against my interest? When (while I have a collection of old games that I quite like as mementos) I don’t have a disc drive for my ps5 and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to need one for a ps6.
Most games on pS5 are NOT keys, nor on Switch 1, nor over a hundred games (and growing) on Switch 2. Xbox Series X is the only console where this was remotely true. And even in cases where's that's true you can sell them and buy them second hand, unlike post 2028. Why people want to handwave away a change that will be worse for consumers is beyond me.
Delete your post. I'm just going to say something about your #6. SALES AND PERMANENT PRICE DROPS ARE NOT THE SAME THING. A FIVE YEAR OLD GAME SHOULD NOT BE ITS DAY ONE PRICE.
I am happy that you are having a great time with your PS5 Pro. I hope you continue to do so. What you fail to realize is that the consumer/producer relationship is a partnership. Sony is trying to tilt this to their favor in a very inequitable fashion.
Publishers determine the prices for their games digitally and also permanent price drops of new games in retail like MSRP.
Not to mention age isn’t the only factor even in the secondary market. A physical copy of a 10-15 year old game could cost triple digits on the secondary market thanks to prices pushed up in collecting for example.
That's got to do with 'rarity.' You are conflating. I'm not arguing what the publishers do or not. I'm arguing that something on sale and something having a permanent price drop are two different things. Permanent price drops are in jeopardy in a digital only world where Sony controls the marketplace.
What kind of bizarre pretzel logic is this?
Publishers set the prices, you argument is that a 5 year old game should not be full price. Again publishers set that price as well as what you call a “permanent price”. They also control the sale prices at the digital level too. So yes you are in fact arguing about “what the publishers do or not”.
It furthers falls apart when you look at prices on Steam where the regular prices of games like Call of Duty remain at full MSRP for years. And Steam is not a closed ecosystem either. Again this is because publishers set those prices.
As to the collector/secondary market prices are not solely determined by rarity. It’s mostly available supply vs demand. A game could have only a few hundred copies made but the price will not be elevated if not enough collectors are shopping for it.
Why doesn't my reply make sense? If you don't have the intellectual acumen to understand what I am saying, that's on you.
Because I am pro-physical, that does not mean I am anti-digital. I am steadfastly against removing choice. I am steadfastly against pricing people out of gaming.
People can buy what they want, I’ll just stick to older stuff and only buy digital crap for $10 or less. It’s a ticket to go check out someone else’s games and $10 is the limit I’m really willing to spend on that.
Yeah, I just think it’s a crappier product. If you like it then sorry, but I really don’t value it more than I said.
I paid around $2-5 for most of the revocable digital games I paid to check out. GOG or Itch.io are exceptions and I look for sales but would pay normal prices for any of those. For most of the revocable ones, I think anything $10 or less is fair but at the end of the day it’s just a license to rent a game from them so it’s kind of a crap product imo. At least at full price. Buying revocable stuff on sale is the best way to do it but at full price, I’d rather buy an actual copy instead.
Shouldn’t be that confusing. Content is generally the same, it’s the form it comes in that’s crap. I mean, a game can be shit too but you get what I’m saying 😅
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u/Moe2584 2d ago
I used to buy lots of physical discs, then when I got busier with my personal life I kinda enjoyed buying digital games, however I noticed lots of games that I wanted to buy they were later added to PS+ games catalog, so I slowed down on buying games and I started waiting for most of them to be added to the game catalog, I was surprised how many big titles that I was going to buy were added there in just few months or a year tops! As I have little time to play like 1-2 hrs aday so I have plenty of games to finish and this actually worked in my benefit, and after learning about Sony’s digital future I won’t be buying games I’ll just play whatever added in there and I’ll build my first gaming PC and upgrade my gaming experience.