No Sony Of Mine
The end of PlayStation discs points to the end of home console gaming itself
Sony’s recent announcement that after January 2028 no new PlayStation games would be released on discs—that is, that no new PlayStation games would be physical products—is probably not a shock if you’ve been following the trends in software and physical media. It is, however, bleak and disappointing.
Ironically, Sony’s decision comes at a time when physical media is seeing a bit of a renaissance. “DVDs and CDs are becoming cool again, thanks mostly to Gen Z,” the Washington Post wrote in December 2025. Vinyl sales have been increasing year over year since 2007; even cassette tapes are becoming cool again! Prices for “retro games”—which, according to GameStop, now include systems as recent as the Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360—show no sign of declining, and playing physical games on original hardware remains the gold standard for experiencing older games.
But there are mixed signals, and alongside this physical media revival is the long-term decline of physical media as the primary means of distributing content. Perhaps video games even held out longer, remaining associated with discs or even cartridges long after downloads, files, and subscriptions came to feel completely normal for computer software and music.
Sony argues that consumers already prefer digital: “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
The writer of the Substack publication Obsolete Sony—not one to look askance at yesterday’s technology—agrees that the abandonment of physical media was a sensible decision, based on economics and logistics:
Console games spent years trying to live in two worlds at once. On one side, they still belonged to the old retail world: boxed releases, used copies, store shelves, and clearance bins. On the other side, the games themselves had already become digital products: installed, authenticated, patched, and tied to accounts….
PlayStation discs were never supported by PlayStation alone. They belonged to a much larger optical-media ecosystem built around replication plants, packaging, shipping, and retail logistics. That infrastructure made discs cheap, common, and worth improving. As it shrank, physical PlayStation games were surviving after the system around them had already thinned out.
He argues that the top video games today have much longer lifecycles and are not profitable without years of sales; this is harder to sustain when they’re physical products on a shelf competing with innumerable other products. But alongside these industrial-logistical concerns is, of course, control and profit:
For Sony, the old retail business has a flaw built into it. A used disc can be sold again and again without the developer, publisher, or platform holder earning anything from those later sales. That was easier to accept when budgets were lower and games were more launch-driven. It becomes harder to defend internally when the industry wants less risk on projects that can cost as much as films.
The argument here, and Sony’s own logic, is more or less that video gaming, or at least modern console gaming, was never about physical media. It was always a software ecosystem that was mediated through physical media merely because of technological limitations.
As technology has evolved, and the physical disc (or cartridge) is no longer necessary for the delivery of the software, it became vestigial and then obsolete. Discless/digital-only gaming is simply the end point of the evolution of physical media itself, or at least of its purpose. Even more succinctly, the media was always incidental to the game: a mere delivery mechanism for it.
This is an incorrect understanding of physical media. In Sony’s imagination, the disc (or lack thereof) is like the delivery truck that brings your package. You don’t care what sort of truck it is, or whether your package spends time in the air or at sea, or which warehouse it ships from; the only thing of relevance to the consumer is that the package arrives.
Sony wants consumers to think—and is claiming, dubiously, that they already think—that the format a video game comes in is as irrelevant to the game itself or to the gaming experience as the manufacturer of the delivery vehicle is to your Amazon package.
This is, in a word, absurd. First of all, the content is never fully separable from the format. For example, the coin-op nature of the arcade machine, and its form factor, influenced what an arcade game was, and what the experience of playing it was. The necessity of swapping discs and cartridges, and the ownership and mobility inherent in a piece of physical media, determined what the home gaming experience was.
Format is not important only in video gaming. What we call the “album” in large part owes itself to the LP, which meant that a single disk could contain an unbroken series of songs. The LP made a listening experience like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, which has no standard quiet breaks between tracks possible. Sure, you could emulate that with streaming. But streaming and the ease of listening to individual songs in any order has changed the idea of the album itself. Put it this way: streaming as the dominant format would not have birthed Sgt. Pepper. The art form and the format were interrelated in subtle ways.
Format/media matters less in software—do you really care if Microsoft Word, or Windows, is installed by a disc that you later stuff in a drawer for 20 years, or by an online download?—because software is mostly utilitarian. But video games are really not software. They are something like quasi-disembodied electronic toys or amusements. Removing the physical media from home video gaming is fundamentally changing what home video gaming is.
Consoles have always been a distinct segment in the broader video game/computer entertainment market. “PC games” early on were a different kind of game than console games, which more often nodded to or simply converted arcade games, which were dominated by the Japanese software developers. PC games often had a cerebral touch, or made curious but not necessarily game-enhancing uses of the computer’s greater processing power; arcade gaming was pure distilled action. Consoles developed their own genre of action-oriented but longer-form games, like platformers. The home video game console was always weaker than an arcade machine or a computer, in terms of processing power. But from the start, it not an inferior computer but an inferior arcade machine.
A PlayStation console without a disc drive is, however, an inferior computer. Which is really to say, there is almost no argument for the continued existence of the PlayStation itself as a piece of hardware. If the only important element of video gaming is the software and account ecosystem, then isn’t it not just the disc but the console itself that is incidental, if not obsolete?
This is not lost on video gamers and industry observers. “Consoles continue their trend of just becoming worse PCs,” PC Gamer published in early July:
[W]hat are Xbox and PlayStation at this point other than PCs, but worse? Sony’s dual announcements—that it will cease producing physical discs in 2028 and also shut down the older PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores next year—seem to have been published simultaneously with a ripping-the-band-aid-off PR mentality….The takeaway of those two announcements landing simultaneously, though, is highlighting that you can only buy games on the PlayStation how and where Sony says you can.
And importantly, that article also notes that physical games had become a notable distinctive of console gaming:
[T]he games industry has been trending towards digital-only releases for years; to the spreadsheet-brained it was just a matter of time until the cost of manufacturing and shipping of physical discs no longer made sense. The PC even led the charge on that front, meaning consoles clinging to the option of buying physical releases was one of their last true differentiators.
But beyond the immediate gaming experience, the end of discs raises larger issues around ownership, lending, trading, and secondhand sales, and preservation issues. So long as a game lives on a server, or can only be accessed through an account, it is not really yours. Digital games downloaded to console hard drives can be lost if your account is banned, or if the console dies and you have no hard drive backup.
With a physical copy, you can “re-download” a game any time, on a new console. And most importantly, you can lend it, sell it, trade it, or build a long-term collection. The buying/selling/trading/collecting element of video gaming, and the stores that support it, have always been a part of what video gaming is. (There are also discless Xboxes, and the next Xbox generation may be entirely discless.)
The Nintendo Switch 2 is now the only mainstream console which remains a true video game console in the classical sense. The Switch consoles do not even have web browsers or apps, an artificial limitation which retains the concept of the home console as exclusively or primarily a gaming machine. In some ways the Switch consoles are anachronistic. But they retain the sense that the console is a console and that the video game is a video game. That is indeed the primary distinctive that home video game consoles still have, and the static savings of cutting disc manufacturing and distribution may turn out to be illusory if it helps lead to a dynamic decline of the home console market itself.
Nothing ever stays the same, in technology and in life. Perhaps the video game console market, dominated by a big three for more than two decades now, is ripe for disruption; perhaps the sense that no other company could muscle into such a tight, complicated market is just complacence. Or perhaps, like the arcade before it, the home console will simply recede into the past and become the stuff of nostalgia.
Video games themselves, of course, are not going anywhere. But that old gaming experience—from the old days of plugging in RCA jacks and blowing out cartridges, to the newer days of turning everything on and listening to the disc tray sliding open, to the little rituals of bringing games to your friend’s house or swapping them at school—all of that was not incidental. It was, in many ways, the thing itself. And it will be missed.
Related Reading:
Home Consoles Changed What Video Games Were