Sony publicly announced the no-disc news on its official channels, including the PlayStation blog, at 8am ET on Wednesday (
Game File also had the news at that time).
Sony's public blog post cited shifts in "consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry" and the "natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends."
The more private one, shared with PlayStation developers and publishers on a digital portal for platform partners, was viewed by Game File. It uses some similar language. For example, it calls the 2028 cut-off of discs for new PlayStation games, a "response" to the "shift from physical discs by consumers and the broader entertainment industry."
For the partner message, Sony made a point to say that game publishers "will still be able to place re-orders for existing PlayStation disc games." That makes explicit the implicit carve-out in the public post, affirming that, say, a PS5 game released in 2027 can still get new discs printed after January 2028. Sony told partners that the ordering process for discs will change in some TBA ways.
Sony also notified its partners that it will "provide publishers with the opportunity to release new games at retail using digital codes," with more details to come (basically, there was no immediate clarity for game makers about whether those codes will be packed in boxes, embedded into cards, or even offered as in inhalant
a la 2078's PlayStation 9).
Sony used a black rectangle with a white PlayStation logo for its public announcement, a visual it's previously used for bad news about
price hikes and
service shutdowns. That's a clear sign that Sony didn't expect fruit baskets and flowers for the news.
The official post on the U.S. PlayStation blog has 7,700 comments and counting, compared to low double digits on the posts preceding or following it. A sampling:
- "Do not like this, I've always preferred physical to digital."
- "Game sizes are going up and hard drives are sky rocketing in price. You will own nothing and pay more…."
- "You're going to let us resell and trade our digital games now, right??
On the Japanese PlayStation blog, where comments from readers are a rarity, the news generated over 100 replies from players expressing a mix of resignation about the change and sadness over the loss of physical discs.
The Japanese market is particularly attached to discs and cartridges, and a move from discs risks frustrating players in Sony's home region.
"I think Japanese users do have a stronger penchant for physical media in general, also exemplified by the fact that the country today is the biggest market in the world for music sold on CD," Serkan Toto, a
go-to analyst about the Japanese games industry, told Game File.
Toto pointed to
a survey from Tokyo-based research firm Cross Marketing that found that it took until 2025 for more Japanese gamers to say they bought all or most of their games digitally than than say they bought all or most as physical media.
The edge of the PS5 disc for Cooking Companions. Photo: Game File
Sony's main remaining facility for making PlayStation game discs is a facility in Austria,
The Verge noted this week. On Wednesday, Austrian outlet
Salzburg reported that the 300-person Sony DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corporation) plant in Austria is already switching much of its capacity to making micro lenses. It quoted DADC president Dietmar Tanzer as saying that 50% of its production were for PlayStation discs (20% for new games), with an expected decline to 10% in 2028. (Some PS5 discs released as recently this year state they were made in
Japan or
Brazil, the latter via outside firm
Solutions 2 Go.)
After Sony's news became official on Wednesday, I reached out to big publishers such as EA, Take Two, and Ubisoft to see if they had a comment or could say if they will still support discs on PlayStation rival Xbox after January 2028. Everyone declined to comment or didn't reply.
Online, some observers said the key issue with Sony's news wasn't even the fate of discs but the future of digital rights. The discontinuation of discs, they said, threatens to extinguish many of the methods people used to share and preserve their games. Digitally purchased games are really digitally purchased licenses, with less portability and permanence.
Wrote comedian Trevor Noah
to his nearly 11 million followers on X/Twitter:
…for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings Which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.
Most importantly though, as we saw from PlayStation this past week, if the media we buy is only digital, it can be taken away from us at a moment's notice with no recourse. Imagine that, one day your entire library of games could be deleted overnight because technically you don't own it.
On Twitter/X, Billy Basso, developer of the lauded 2024 indie game
Animal Well, lamented Sony's move. Basso posted photos of physical PS5 boxed copies of his game,
writing:
Extremely sad to think I'll never release another physical game for PlayStation. Releasing the physical versions of Animal Well was a huge motivator all throughout development. It really kills my desire to develop for the platform. I'm hoping they reverse this decision : (
The PC version of Animal Well,
which I played obsessively, had only released digitally. I followed up with Basso to discuss the difference between his anxiety over an all-digital PlayStation future vs. the nearly all-digital PC present.
Basso broke it down for me:
It's important to me that the games I make will be playable for many decades after release. On console, physical releases are important since it's the only insurance against the platform shutting their digital store down at some point (as PlayStation just announced with PS3 and Vita!)
For PC it is less of an issue, because it is an open platform, and people can more easily share, mod, etc.. I do still have interest in doing a physical PC release at some point. I also think if more consoles back out of physical distribution, we'll see more boutique physical PC releases.
Even more on this topic:
- Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a candidate for next year's presidential election in France, reacted to the Sony news and to GTA VI launching disc-free by stating: "Demain, vous paierez sans jamais rien posséder. Ni prêt, ni revente, ni garantie de conserver ce qu'on a payé." (Google translation to English: "Tomorrow, you will pay without ever owning anything. No loan, no resale, no guarantee of keeping what we've paid for.")
- Iam8Bit, a company that makes physical collectors' editions of games, said they "were profoundly disappointed by Sony's decision."
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