Sony plans to stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028, a move that pushes the console business further into storefront accounts, licenses and corporate permission slips.
In a PlayStation blog post cited by Ars Technica, Sony said that from that date, new games will be sold through the PlayStation Store and at retailers only in digital formats. Sony described the shift as a response to customer behavior, saying digital media has moved well ahead of discs.
That is the tidy version. The messier one is that a chunk of PlayStation customers still buy discs for reasons Sony cannot patch away with a blog post: resale, lending, collecting, preservation and the plain old comfort of having the thing on a shelf instead of buried in an account menu.
The ownership problem Sony keeps stepping on
Digital purchases do not work like a disc in a box. In the usual model, customers buy access under a license, delivered through a store account and governed by whatever terms and rights sit behind it. If the store changes, rights expire or a company pulls content, the customer can be left with less than the word “buy” seemed to promise.
Techdirt has pointed to earlier Sony cases in which movies and TV shows customers had bought through Sony storefronts disappeared after licensing arrangements changed. That history is why this PlayStation disc decision landed as more than a manufacturing update. For people already suspicious of digital ownership, Sony did not announce convenience. It announced dependence.
Techdirt also reported that nearly 80% of PlayStation game purchases are now digital. That helps explain Sony’s business logic, if not its customer relations. A company looking at that split may decide the disc crowd is an expensive minority. The annoying part, for Sony, is that minorities can still be loud, loyal and commercially meaningful.
Players flooded Sony’s social feeds
Kotaku reported that the backlash spread across Sony and PlayStation social accounts after the announcement. A Sony post on X promoting the next Spider-Man movie, normally the kind of corporate filler that draws limited response, had more than 3,000 replies, with many users attacking the end of PlayStation discs, according to Kotaku.
On Instagram, Kotaku said a recent PlayStation video had drawn more than 2,000 comments, compared with the roughly 200 to 300 replies many posts usually receive. Kotaku also reported that a PlayStation YouTube trailer for a World of Tanks update had more than 300 comments, far above the sub-50 comment count for many smaller videos, with many comments aimed at Sony’s disc decision rather than the trailer.
The criticism continued when PlayStation resumed posting on X after nearly a week of silence, according to Techdirt. Kotaku reported that a video promoting a new wireless flight stick drew more than 12,000 negative comments and nearly 4,000 angry quote posts in under an hour.
Sony has not, according to the reporting cited by Techdirt, offered a public retreat from the January 2028 plan. For now, the company is betting that digital buying habits will overpower the disc loyalists. The disc loyalists are currently using Sony’s own marketing channels to tell it that bet may be uglier than the spreadsheet suggested.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
