Sony is ending physical disc production for new PlayStation releases in 2028. For collectors, preservationists, bargain hunters and anyone who enjoys owning the thing they just paid $130 for, the future suddenly looks a lot shitter.
I have shelves full of video games.
Proper shelves. Slightly alarming shelves. Shelves that have spent years accumulating steelbooks, battered pre-owned cases, art books, collector’s editions, tiny plastic nonsense and boxes so unnecessarily enormous they appear to contain a household appliance.
Some of those games were day-one purchases. Plenty were cheap second-hand punts because I vaguely remembered somebody saying they were good. Others came from friends. Some went back out into the world when I finished them.
Then there are the dangerous ones.
The $20 game I bought on a whim, unexpectedly adored, and subsequently repurchased in some ludicrous deluxe edition because the collector goblin had been summoned.
That whole ecosystem has been part of gaming for as long as I can remember.
Sony has now put an expiry date on a huge chunk of it.
From January 2028, physical game disc production will end for all new releases on PlayStation consoles. Anything released on disc before the cut-off is unaffected. New titles afterwards will be sold through the PlayStation Store and retailers in digital formats. Sony says the move reflects changing consumer preferences and the wider shift towards downloads.
People were, predictably, fucking furious. As they should be.
Collectors started talking about boycotts. Preservationists raised the alarm. Anyone who has ever traded a finished game towards the next one could immediately see where this was heading.
Sony finally addressed the backlash during its July 31 investor discussions.
The plan remains.
The company said it had seen no negative sales impact from the announcement and does not expect one when the change takes effect. It is apparently still working out how to respond to unhappy players while proceeding “cautiously” with the transition.
Cool. I hate it.
I paid for the game. I would quite like the game.
Gaming is already an expensive hobby in Australia.
Grand Theft Auto VI currently costs $129.95 for the standard PS5 edition on the Australian PlayStation Store.
At that price, I want the purchase to mean I bought something. We’re in a cost of living crisis, y’know. I want reasonable confidence that, provided I have working hardware, I can keep playing what I bought.
Developers do not owe me patches until the sun explodes. Multiplayer servers eventually close. Studios move on. Technology changes. I understand all of that.
Leave me frozen in version 1.00 if you must. Let that horse remain permanently embedded in a fence. He has accepted his fate. So have I.
What bothers me is the growing distance between the very ordinary experience of buying a game and what the paperwork says happened.
Sony’s Australian software agreement describes PlayStation software as licensed to the user and grants a limited, personal, non-transferable right to use it. Its terms also make clear that services and functionality can change over time.
Australian consumer protections still apply, of course. A licence agreement does not magic away your statutory rights.
It still feels profoundly weird to hand over $129.95 for something whose long-term existence increasingly depends on accounts, authentication systems, storefronts and decisions being made somewhere far above my little head.
Especially because I’ve already discovered how flimsy some of that infrastructure becomes when you do something outrageous.
Like move house.
My PlayStation account is permanently British
I made my PlayStation account while living in the UK.
Then I proceeded to fill it with years of stuff.
Trophies. Purchases. Games. Transaction history. Tiny digital badges commemorating the evening I spent seven hours trying to make one particular number go up. It became my gaming history. Then I moved to Australia.
Naturally, I assumed I could update the account.
Nope.
PlayStation’s current support documentation states that you cannot change an account’s country or region after creating it.
I live in Perth. My PlayStation account remains spiritually trapped somewhere outside a Greggs in Bristol.
If I want an Australian account, I can make another one and begin chopping my PlayStation life into pieces.
What an incredible solution.
Years of trophies, purchases and history remain attached to the UK account because that happened to be the country I lived in when I signed up.
This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me deeply suspicious of an all-digital future.
Do you know how much trouble my physical collection caused when I emigrated?
None.
I put it in boxes.
I did not have to notify Elden Ring that we were relocating.
Horizon did not request proof of Australian residency.
My discs travelled roughly 14,000 kilometres without developing an identity crisis.
I unpacked them. They were still mine. Lovely. Boring.
Ownership should be boring.
The second-hand gamble is one of gaming’s greatest pleasures
I fucking love buying a game because it is cheap enough to shrug at.
Maybe the cover catches my eye. Maybe I vaguely remember a review from three years ago. Maybe it is sitting on a pre-owned shelf for $18, and I have temporarily abandoned fiscal responsibility.
Why not?
Low-risk discovery is wonderful. Sometimes the game is rubbish. I move it along. Sometimes it eats my brain.
Suddenly I am texting friends about it. Shouting about it into the internet void. I want the sequel. I am watching developer interviews. I have somehow ordered an art book from Japan.
That original second-hand sale may not have handed the publisher any money, but it can create a customer.
I have discovered entire series that way.
Borrowing does the same thing. Someone shoves a game into your hands and tells you to play it. Your sibling lends you something and accepts, several years later, that they are never seeing it again.
A friend finishes a new release, passes it over and accidentally causes your next hyperfixation.
That circulation gives games room to find people after the marketing campaign has stopped screaming. This is how cult classics are made.
An account-bound download cannot travel through the world in quite the same way.
Sony says it is working with retailers on codes in packages for the post-disc era.
The box survives.
Inside: A friggin’ code. Wonderful. A beautiful commemorative rectangle containing authentication.
GTA VI is already showing us the future
We do not even have to wait until 2028 for a preview.
JB Hi-Fi’s Australian PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto VI explicitly contains no disc. You get a download code in the box.
That code is single-use and non-transferable. JB also specifies that the PS5 code requires a PlayStation account registered to Australia.
Hi.
Remember me?
My account cannot become Australian.
This is the exact sort of stupid edge case that suddenly matters when access becomes welded to accounts and regions.
And once that GTA code has been redeemed, the box has lost the thing that made traditional physical ownership useful.
You cannot sell the game inside it. You cannot lend it. You cannot trade it towards something else. Your friend cannot borrow it for the weekend.
Twenty years from now, nobody is stumbling across that copy at an op shop, taking it home and discovering whatever remains playable.
The container survived. The transferable object did not.
Please explain the fucking pricing to me
Here is where I get particularly cranky.
A traditional boxed release has manufacturing attached to it.
Disc. Case. Printing. Freight. Storage. Distribution. Retail shelf space.
Special editions add maps, books, steel cases, art cards, statues and whatever other shiny objects publishers have correctly identified as my personal weakness.
Downloads remove a decent chunk of that physical chain. Yet there is no grand rule where we, the customer, receive a lovely discount in return.
Again, the Australian PlayStation Store currently lists standard GTA VI at $129.95. JB Hi-Fi’s boxed PS5 code version is also a retail product, except the traditional resale value disappears once that code is used.
So we can lose the disc, trade-in, lending, resale and independent second-hand market without necessarily seeing the savings that people once assumed digital distribution would bring. How is this right?
A closed console storefront also removes one of the nicest things about physical retail: competition between shops. One retailer discounts a title. Another clears stock. Someone trades a copy in. Pre-owned copies start circulating. A person on Marketplace discovers they need petrol money.
Prices get weird. I like weird.
A digital console purchase funnels you towards the platform holder’s store and whatever sale happens to be running there.
It is a much tidier system. For somebody.
We have normalised buying unfinished games
There is another ugly little wrinkle here.
Patches are brilliant.
They fix bugs. Improve performance. Add accessibility features. Repair broken quests. Rescue games that launched in a state best described as oh dear.
They have also created an enormous safety net. The launch build no longer has to be the final word.
That flexibility has undoubtedly helped developers solve problems that would once have been burned permanently onto millions of discs.
It also makes shipping something rough considerably easier to survive.
Release now.
Patch next week.
Patch again.
Roadmap coming soon. Performance update planned. Feature arriving later.
Thank you for your patience.
We have become bizarrely accustomed to paying full price for software while hoping the version we really want eventually turns up.
And yes, modern games are enormous, complicated things made by human beings. Bugs happen. Deadlines happen. Certification happens. I am not suggesting every dodgy launch is a moustache-twirling publisher deliberately selling us garbage.
The safety net still changes the equation.
You can now buy something half-baked with the expectation that future support will finish the job.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes the studio gets shut down. Sometimes resources move elsewhere. Sometimes the roadmap quietly shrinks. Sometimes the fixes arrive years later.
The customer has already paid.
If games become increasingly dependent on future downloads to reach their intended state, long-term ownership becomes even stranger.
The disc version of a title might contain the launch build.
The actually-good version may live across another 80GB of patches sitting on somebody’s server.
Now preservation needs both.
And if the patch server disappears one day?
Congratulations. The horse is back in the fence.
Games are already disappearing
This is where the collector rant stops being funny.
Preservation is in dreadful shape.
A major 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that 87 per cent of classic games released in the United States were out of print, describing the situation as critically endangered.
Eighty-seven per cent.
Games disappear remarkably quickly for something we have spent decades insisting is a major cultural medium.
And they are particularly messy historical objects because they can keep changing after release.
Updates alter mechanics. Music licences expire. Dialogue gets edited. Textures change. Servers close. Entire modes vanish. Bugs are fixed. Bugs are introduced.
Something hilarious gets patched because players discovered they could launch themselves over a mountain using a bin.
Years later, somebody remembers.
“I swear this room used to look different.”
“I swear that character said something else.”
“No, there was definitely an exploit here.”
“I remember this song.”
And everybody else goes:
Are you sure?
Congratulations, we have invented the gaming Mandela Effect
This genuinely fascinates and horrifies me.
Imagine a game receives 40 patches over fifteen years.
The version currently downloadable in 2045 has been polished, tweaked and reassembled dozens of times.
Old forum threads are dead. A YouTube upload disappeared when its owner deleted their channel.
The wiki documents the current behaviour. The developer has long since moved on.
Some woman is sitting there going, I KNOW THE BIN USED TO LAUNCH YOU.
Prove it.
Maybe somebody archived the launch build. Maybe there is an old disc sitting in a cupboard. Maybe a preservationist documented it. Maybe nobody did.
Lost media rarely needs a ceremonial deletion button. History can disappear through boring little acts of attrition.
A server closes. A licence lapses. A storefront removes something. An old build gets replaced. An account system reaches end of life.
The people who remember it slowly stop talking about it. Eventually the current version becomes the version.
That creeps me out.
Games deserve an accurate history.
Discs have plenty of problems of their own
A plastic circle does not magically preserve an entire modern game forever.
Some releases ship with enormous mandatory downloads. Online-only features will still die with their servers. A launch disc may contain a substantially worse version than the game eventually becomes.
Hardware fails. Disc rot exists. Authentication can complicate matters.
A full preservation effort needs far more than retail copies.
Still, every independent copy in the world gives history another chance to survive. A launch build can show how something originally worked. An old version can reveal what changed. A forgotten copy can turn up years after official distribution ends.
Preservation is often saved by someone keeping the thing everybody else assumed was worthless.
Thank god for those people.
Truly.
The future of media has repeatedly been rescued by some nerd who refused to throw something away.
Streaming has already trained us for impermanence
We know what disappearing media feels like now.
You go looking for a film you watched last year.
Gone. Different service. Wrong country. Licence expired. Song missing. Episode unavailable.
Original version replaced.
Sorry!
Streaming at least makes the bargain reasonably obvious. You are paying for access to a changing catalogue.
Buying individual games feels different.
There is a price. There is a Buy button. The title appears in Your Collection. You can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars building that library over years. So I want stronger guarantees.
The account holding mine cannot even follow me from one country to another.
That does not inspire confidence.
I buy digital stuff all the time
Downloads are convenient as hell. I use them constantly.
I enjoy deciding at 11:47 pm that I suddenly need a $7 indie game because somebody mentioned it contains a frog.
I like preloading. I like small games that would never receive a boxed release being able to exist at all. I like having a giant library without needing a second house to store it. Great. Keep all of that.
Why does convenience require deleting the alternative?
Sony says consumer preferences have moved towards digital distribution. Its own fiscal data supports a huge shift in that direction, with downloads making up the majority of full-game software sales.
Of course they do.
The industry has spent years building everything around them.
Digital-only consoles exist. Storefronts sit on the home screen. Subscriptions normalise temporary libraries. Major sales push downloadable copies constantly. Physical releases are becoming less common. Then we point at the resulting behaviour and declare the matter settled.
I am unconvinced that “most people use this” automatically translates to “remove every other option”.
Especially when the disappearing option gives consumers rights and freedoms the replacement currently does not reproduce.
If this is the future, give us better fucking rights
If discs really are heading for the grave, digital purchasing needs to grow up.
Let accounts move countries. Preserve historical builds. Make long-term access a genuine priority when storefronts close. Give archives workable routes to preserve commercially unavailable software. Figure out inheritance. Explore lending.
Give people clarity about what happens to decades of purchases when platforms eventually reach end of life.
And please stop treating basic questions about ownership as quaint nostalgia from people who just enjoy sniffing instruction manuals.
People build collections because media matters to them.
Mine tells the story of my life in a very silly format.
There are games I remember playing as a kid. Things I bought with my first wages. Games attached to relationships, houses, terrible periods, wonderful periods, sleepless weekends and people I no longer know.
They are artefacts.
Some happen to be artefacts where I spent 200 hours gathering imaginary herbs.
They still count.
My PlayStation account is already proof that a supposedly frictionless collection can be less portable than a cardboard box full of games.
I moved countries. The discs came with me. No password reset. No region compatibility article. No fresh account. No customer support. No terms and conditions.
Pick up box.
Move box.
Put box down.
Fourteen thousand kilometres later, I still own what’s inside.
That should not feel like an endangered feature.
TL;DR
- Sony will stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation releases from January 2028. Existing and pre-2028 disc releases are unaffected.
- Sony has acknowledged the backlash and currently plans to proceed.
- Retailers are expected to continue selling some titles as download codes inside boxes.
- Australia already has a grim example: JB Hi-Fi’s PS5 GTA VI box contains a single-use download code, requires an Australian PlayStation account and has no disc.
- PlayStation accounts cannot change country or region after creation. I know because mine is still tied to the UK despite me now living in Australia.
- Removing transferable copies threatens second-hand buying, trade-ins, lending and one of the easiest low-risk ways to discover unfamiliar games.
- Patch-dependent releases add another preservation headache. Sometimes the version worth keeping does not even exist on the launch disc.
- A 2023 Video Game History Foundation study found 87 per cent of classic US games were out of print.
- I will continue being extremely normal and chill about all of this.
Stay unruly.
