QuickTake: Sony announces the end of physical discs from 2028 - and of owning your future PS6 games
No more physical discs after January 2028.
July 1 is the day that Sony announced it would be doing away with physical discs from January 2028 - meaning any future games would only be available digitally. To canny folk, it clearly hints at the PlayStation 6 launching around this time with a digital-first policy. And it's a shame, if not slightly unsurprising.
PS5 Pro shipped in 2024 without a disc drive, and Grand Theft Auto 6 is digital-first, even with physical cases being available to pre-order right now. That's likely what spurred Sony to announce this, but that doesn't make it any less shocking. But for me, it also marks the end of something that began in 1997.
Physical Nostalgia
Earlier, I was drawn to an Instagram post by tr_chris_, a lovely guy whom I met, as well as his daughter, several times now at the yearly Tomb Raider convention in Derby. Reading him express massive disappointment that there won't be physical discs to buy soon made me look at my own physical games.
On my shelf, I have all of my original PS1 games, including Tomb Raider II, as well as many Official PlayStation Magazine UK demo discs, and a mix of PS2 and PS3 games that I've kept since day one. I remember swapping many of these at school to discover other titles I never expected to play, but ended up loving. Overboard, Rosco McQueen, G-Police are just some that stick out to me.
Every one of them spurs a memory - from when I first played them, to struggling at various points. But like the books on my shelf, they evoke a warm, comforting memory.
So to see Sony publish a post earlier today with this paragraph was really something:
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.
Essentially, the future will look like how GTA 6 is being made available - physical game boxes but with downloadable codes inside. This is going to be hugely damaging to stores in time once the PlayStation 6 reaches its halfway point. By some incredibly fortunate timing, some outlets began to break the news that XBOX is looking into digitising physical game discs.
But the endpoint is still the same - the landscape is going fully digital, and for game preservation, that's an awful horizon to look out to.
Game Fragmentation
The PlayStation 6 library will be the first where it'll be very difficult to preserve the games that land on its platform because of Sony's decision. Because there will be no physical media for these games, it's likely that once you 'buy' something for the console, it's available for as long as Sony allows it.
It's a far cry from Sony's 2013 E3 conference, where they made a point of showcasing how easy it was to borrow a PS4 game.
So the hundreds of pounds that you may want to spend on Standard, Premium, Ultimate, etc., editions of PS6 titles could be completely inaccessible a decade later. For anyone who ranges from the casual to the die-hard gamer, that's simply wrong, and most frightening.
Take my son - by the time it's 2028, he'll be five, and we'll have very likely played many matches of Mario Kart World and locked Winston in the Freezer in Tomb Raider III many times too, as I have physical copies of both. But perhaps I decide to buy a souped-up PS6 port of Tomb Raider: Catalyst, or any other game, I'd feel as if there's an invisible time limit, no matter what.
It makes me want to stop at this point for consoles. I'm happy with my Nintendo Switch 2 and PS5 Pro attached to its Disc Drive add-on, as well as having all my older consoles with their respective physical media of cartridges and discs. I don't want to be beholden to Sony or even Microsoft's invisible time limits.
Physical Media gives players control of when they want to play their favourite games whenever they want, without worrying about a digital licence or an internet connection. Unfortunately, Sony only sees 'consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry' as deciding factors as to what it wants to do.
So perhaps January 2028, unless Sony does a U-turn, is when I sign off, and keep to the games that I still enjoy offline, all these years later.
