You've gotta read this because Sony just dropped news that will fundamentally change how we collect games forever. Starting January 2028, PlayStation will completely stop making physical discs for new titles, which means anything released after that date exists exclusively as a digital download on the Store. They already framed it as "aligning with community preference" — their corporate way of saying they've noticed people buying fewer copies and want to cut out the manufacturing cost entirely. The silver lining is that any game you bought before 2028 will still have a physical version, so your current library isn't immediately nuked by this policy change. But here's why this matters more than it looks on paper — think about all those people who buy new releases and resell them later to fund their next purchase; that secondary market completely vanishes for post-2028 titles, which is a massive loss for budget collectors.
I'm already getting heated because there are serious downsides they gloss over in the press release, and Sony isn't the first company to do this poorly. This move follows GTA VI making headlines last year for having a physical box that contained only a download code — literally selling people a cardboard box around nothing — which was an absolute PR disaster even for them. Besides the resale issue, going all digital makes it nearly impossible to share games across households and forces everyone to rely on your account being perpetually active and online just to play anything you already own forever. For collectors this is particularly brutal because physical copies are the only thing that actually preserves a game after Sony moves its servers or shuts down services later. They're betting the house that people prefer convenience over ownership, but they're also removing decades of culture around physical media in one clean executive order.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/games/960160/sony-playstation-disc-production-ending
I'm already getting heated because there are serious downsides they gloss over in the press release, and Sony isn't the first company to do this poorly. This move follows GTA VI making headlines last year for having a physical box that contained only a download code — literally selling people a cardboard box around nothing — which was an absolute PR disaster even for them. Besides the resale issue, going all digital makes it nearly impossible to share games across households and forces everyone to rely on your account being perpetually active and online just to play anything you already own forever. For collectors this is particularly brutal because physical copies are the only thing that actually preserves a game after Sony moves its servers or shuts down services later. They're betting the house that people prefer convenience over ownership, but they're also removing decades of culture around physical media in one clean executive order.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/games/960160/sony-playstation-disc-production-ending