GoKawiilis a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Cody Spencer, the co-owner of the small games retail chain Pink Gorilla Games, put it well when I asked about the impact of Sony’s recent announcement that it will stop making discs for new games starting January 2028. “It’s sad to see. This decision is only a negative for gamers. We’re losing the ability to sell games, to share games, and to own games.”
Sony’s announcement has been devastating news for many in the games industry. Not just players, but also groups like independent retail stores and preservationists that try and make gaming more accessible.
“This is unfortunate news for those who still prefer buying games on physical media, and is certainly a significant hit to consumer rights, the resale market, and game creators whose businesses rely on the physical market,” Frank Cifaldi, executive director of the Video Game History Foundation, says in a statement.
Boutique publishers are also lamenting PlayStation’s announcement. “We are profoundly disappointed by Sony’s decision to suspend physical games production in 2028,” says iam8bit in a statement. “Physical games are vital to games preservation, ownership, and consumer choice, values that have guided iam8bit since our first physical release in 2016. Our commitment to these values remains unchanged. Long live physical media.” Lost in Cult, in its own statement, says that it aims to “do everything in our power to preserve video games to the best of our ability and will continue to do so for as long as we can.”
But the move isn’t exactly unexpected. For a long time now, video game sales have primarily been digital — just look at Capcom saying that 93 percent of its game sales were digital over its last fiscal year. Still, it’s disappointing for people who want to have games in a more tangible form than as data on a hard drive.
The reality is that, despite the outcry, things aren’t going to be different for most people right away. “Physical sales of new PlayStation 5 games have been declining for some time,” Spencer says. “So immediately after the switch to digital only I don’t think we’ll see much of a change.”
In five to 10 years, Spencer expects to see “increased prices for the physical titles printed before 2028 and a niche but strong demand for our products.” While that’s good for business, “I’d personally rather not have [that] be the case.”
Even further down the road, “the very idea of physical video games will be foreign and more seen as a novelty, which will not be good for us at all,” Spencer says. “Our type of store may be seen more like a record store. A place for largely the most passionate fans of the medium rather than a spot everyone goes.”
Sony has already been inching toward a potential digital-only future for a while now. The PS5, after all, launched in 2020 with a cheaper version without a disc drive, and the PS5 Pro requires a separate disc drive purchase if you want to play physical games at all. And this generation isn’t even the first time Sony has launched digital-only hardware; 2009’s PSP Go handheld didn’t have a UMD drive, Andrew Borman, director of digital preservation at The Strong National Museum of Play, reminded me.
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