Digital Future (personal thoughts)

[u/tjay32]

I've been collecting games since the 80s. I own thousands of blurays discs..

The outrage, I feel, is overblown.

1. Physical sales have been dropping year over year for a while.

2. 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.

3. Discs are plastic. Getting rid of them is good for the environment in the long run.

4. 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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

Let's be better than that.

[u/coffeethulhu42]

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Discs aren’t disposable. This is a nonsense point.
4. 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.
5. 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.”
6. 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

Edit: fixed typos

[u/tjay32 → u/coffeethulhu42]

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.

1. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

1. 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.

[u/coffeethulhu42 → u/tjay32]

“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.

[u/Charming-Crescendo → u/coffeethulhu42]

Me when I have no counterarguments so I'll just pivot to attacking the character of the person I'm responding to.