Sony has just announced on their PlayStation blog that they will stop the production of game discs starting January 2028. This effectively means a shift away from physical media to one that fully relies on downloading content from the PlayStation online store.
Although not technically confirmed, this announcement would strongly indicate that the PlayStation 6 will do away with its optical drive altogether as previously speculated. Of course, physical media has long since been on the ropes, particularly when it comes to gaming. Valve’s recently released Steam Machine doesn’t feature an optical drive, and for that matter, neither does the average gaming PC these days. But it’s still disappointing to see in many ways.
Although digital downloads have their advantages, a major problem here is that due to Digital Rights Management (DRM) you only ever get a license to lease a game. This means losing the ability to lend or borrow a game, and will likely mark the end of second hand sales. With narrow exceptions such as Good Old Games (GoG) and its DRM-free installers that you can e.g. burn onto a CD or copy to a USB drive as a static instance of the software, this shift by Sony effectively ends game ownership for PlayStation owners.
The stars have aligned. Asmongold and Hackaday talk about the same thing at the same time.
don’t worry, boomers! soon enough there will be a HaD article about someone putting games on vinyl
like this –> https://hackaday.com/2026/05/31/loading-sega-genesis-games-off-a-vinyl-record/
Just one month ago: https://hackaday.com/2026/05/31/loading-sega-genesis-games-off-a-vinyl-record/
Although personally I get more of a kick out of loading data onto (eg) a C64 by playing an MP3 from a phone. The latest modern technology, pretending to be a cassette player, to talk to old tech :)
We almost had that in early 80s. Magnavox was looking to connect CED to Odyssey system but that never got out of prototyping stage
Not Sony though. This story buries the lede that ceasing physical media production doesn’t actually change anything, because they have no games to begin with.
It’s a good opportunity to boycott the PS6 and Sony products in general.
They’ve been long enough in business, anyway.
If a company had done this a few years back, I’d have said it would have been the end of them, but these days, perhaps there are enough kids who’ve… Who knows, one generation from now, they might never have even seen one in real life. Personally I think this will hurt their current sales, enough games companies have come and gone over the years, it’s a gamble, but no doubt they’ll continue to operate, surely they’ve got enough pennies squirreled away to weather the transition.
It’s basically incredibly similar to what Microsoft did a few years back, locking your games to your account, and they got crucified. Sony even shit on them.
They sure did! I still remember the E3 bit where the Sony reps were saying: “This is how you lend a friend a game on Playstation 4!” And they handed a disc case to one another. I ran a game store at the time. I can honestly say it’s a legit reason the One failed in sales.
Yeah. Time’s are a-changing. Don’t think we’ll be to that weird shit they predicted with the “Playstation 9” promo they ran during PS2 years.
With so few people buying physical games anymore, that small group is costing them more and more money over time maintaining those facilities. In a couple years they would be losing money on that group.
A person costing them money “threatening” to boycott is akin to an attacker “threatening” to stop punching you.
I don’t know. Let’s see it this way: People who decide to boycott Sony are not “threathening” or “attacking”, they are simply turning away silently, feeling heartbroken and betrayed. They just vanish, along with their wallet.
Another hypothethical explanation: Companies like Sony started this. They cheated on physical media for years..:
Day 1 Patches, discs that come with online installers, online registration, account requirement, games that require server connection for single player mode/offline play etc.
They crippled the physical releases on purpose to make them unappealing. Even sold at same price as download releases.
And then, when sales dropped ovef the yeaes,
they made it look as if the market has decided against physical media.
So Sony and friends can close production factories for optical drives and BD production, while washing their hands in innoccence.
They can also put an end to those second-hand sales, too. Which always had been a nasty thorn in their eyes.
“They can also put an end to those second-hand sales, too. Which always had been a nasty thorn in their eyes.”
Steam did that years ago and gamers let them. With the Xbox One DRM and used games controversy, at least Xbox gamers were smart enough to protest that and prevent it.
I mean, it’s not just about games.
The PlayStation also used to be a widespread video player.
PlayStation could play Audio CDs and Video CDs, PlayStation 2 could play DVDs..
Later versions added Blu Ray support, too.
I mean, sure, dedicated players still exist and are probably better anyway.
But the PlayStations helped adoption of these formats in households.
Because even the lowest social class of people got their PS eventually.
I know this sound a bit like trolling, but to let’s be honest:
Even the poorest households got access to a cheap TV and a PlayStation, we know this from friends and relatives.
And that made it possible to give them films or music as gifts or to exchange them.
That’s the social component that’s also being lost once optical drives are nolonger available to PlayStations.
Seems to me people don’t play electronic games anymore. The games play you. I hope Sony and every other game company ultimately fails. CRTs/LCDs have become vehicles for a kind of mental enslavement.
Plant a vegetable garden, ride a horse,learn to play a piano, take up wood carving, go fishing, knit a quilt, play cards with a friend or neighbor. Pick up a pen and write your own story.
Instead of living a fake life on a glass/plastic screen, live a real one in reality. The frame rate is limited only by C and the resolution is Planck’s distance.
Top that, Sony.
In Soviet Russia…
Weren’t we supposed to start the boycott 21 years ago, when the Sony rootkit came to light.
That just after closing PS3 and PSVita online services (so you cannot download purchased digital games for those anymore) and removing hundreds of movies from the store (so you cannot watch any of those anymore even if you purchased them).
Like they say, “if buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing”.
How are you going to pirate a game that was only ever a streaming exclusive?
Boomers?
My 21 year old son is a game system collector and recently spoke to me about this. He and I share a dislike of non-physical media.
Unless they come up with a way to give you a physical presence of “I own that title” I’ll avoid cloud based versions of content. Further, as my son mentioned, it turns the gaming world into what we’re now seeing with streaming. Selective showing of titles that come and go, with absolutely no requirements. What titles stay and go? Who makes that choice? Is this another battlefield like net neutrality?
Transfer of ownership is another problem with this model. I buy game X. I don’t like game X, not my style, or I’ve finished it and want to take it out of my collection but allow someone else to pay me for that copy I bought new…..WHAT COPY?? You bought bits, or more accurately RENTED them. Without putting in a lot of time and materials you have no easy way to put it into useable storage that you own. You can’t go to a flea market and try to sell your games because they’re not YOURS.
But the video game makers will gladly still charge you the same prices for that product. Even though it does not truly exist.
I’m happy with the systems I have. Which as NOT QUITE A BOOMER include the old Atari VCS, Playstation 2, my Atari 800XL with fujinet, and an arcade emulator machine. So this doesn’t directly affect me. But be warned that this is another way to monetize entertainment that leaves you with NOTHING tangible. Not without effort and equipment needed to make your own physical copy.
If I were a modern day gamer, it might make me think long and hard about purchasing a product that does not support the physical copy versions.
Well pretty much the majority of stores including everyone’s favorite. The nearest solution is the customer doing their own “fixing into a medium” their copy.
The streaming model of selective titles which come and go cannot be emphasized enough.
When you pay a subscription it’s one thing, you’re essentially paying for membership to a buffet restaurant that you can show up to and eat what they have at any time, but the restaurant still gets to decide what is on the menu.
With games it’s much more akin to buying a car, paying cash for it and then one day walking out to your drive way only to discover that the manufacturer has decided they are taking the car back, they point at the purchase contract which states you never owned the car, you just had the right to use it until they decided it was no longer profitable to manufacture spare parts.
Blame websites like GBAtemp for this, instead of the company
Xbox has also confirmed the same
How exactly does not having physical media stop piracy? In fact GBATemp might be the only recourse that some now have to get back their games.
Why is a website responsible for the deeds of Sony? Rather than… you know…. Sony?
Physical disc stopped being ownership years ago for many games, with DLC and up-to-date patches required to play because of online components.
Physical is fine for games with no online, but pointless once online is required.
Back in time games allowed to configure the server settings for online-play.
It was possible to use community operated servers beside the official server(s).
Like…Rust?
The title should have been “sony announced playstation games will be subscription only”. Because lately their concept of “buying” are equivalent to “renting”, but they refuse to word it as such.
Since the PS4 Sony has the ability to revoke that physical disc from running too.
You can’t launch a game from disc without it verifying the license online, just like digital downloads.
They wrote the consoles OS after all.
Same deal with xbox. Nintendo could if they wanted to (thou I can only say for certain the Switch lacked such a function, no idea on their newer hardware)
Nintendo has it as well in the form of the “virtual carts” or whatever they call it. Some friends wanted to do modded on an older Switch console, and we couldn’t just pop the game in. No, we had to take permission to play the game from a third switch and transfer it to this one. No wonder piracy is making a comeback.
Pretty sure there was a story awhile back of Nintendo revoking either a game or consoles themselves.
The Video Game market is DEAD.
Content PIRACY is going to be a constant thing.
SONY asked for it…. SONY and the ENTIRE market can have it.
Every part of SOFTWARE coming down the pipe for a computer is going to have to do war with this problem…
This is not just about video games.
Every single function a computer has will be changed over this video game fail about OWNERSHIP.
This subject has national security concerns…. Microsoft the worst offender.
National security concerns for which nation?
Every single one, Without exception.
The COMPUTER has little concept of borders.
That’s why many countries in Europe have recently dropped Microsoft Office.
And soon came back to be cucked by Micro$lop when it turned out free alternatives are 10x worse than Office.
Hi other me! 👋🙂
So, Steam had been very good maintaining my games library. Until they updated the Steam client to only support Win10 and up. I’m sure that made perfect sense to them, but the problem is that older games might not run reliably on the new OS. That still pisses me off. Why should there not be a locked down older Steam client to support the download of these older titles. To me this is a “You had one job” moment, and they failed. That PS1 still runs, with those old discs…
They probably consider the Linux version of Steam to be the one to handle those games because Wine can handle compatibility with old games better than modern Windows.
Also you can’t expect them to support an old OS that no longer gets security updates forever.
My suggestion is to switch to Linux and be wowed by how well Wine and Proton work now.
I’ve already boycotted Sony over their CD copy protection rootkit. And their bait and switch by removal of otheros from the PS3.
But I see this move to rent games as a service (for a finite number of years, until the authorization servers are powered off), just as toxic as software as a service. You pay money to own nothing. Rich people traditionally buy things that increase in value over time, poor people buy things that depreciates in value over time. But this is a step even further pay for something and own absolutely nothing at all over time.
Surprised not to find this higher in the comments. If Sony aren’t making discs anymore then how will they distribute their rootkits?
Every so often I consider going back to gaming but as a casual it looks so expensive and complicated these days – consoles + games are expensive, everything needs accounts & subscriptions… compared to the days you could buy a console and a few games, take it home, plug it in and be gaming happily in minutes with no overheads it’s just more than I can be bothered to spend my money on.
Insert quarter to play.
You will own nothing and be happy, peasant:
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/0*OxqpnZMpesQ2xuJ5.png
What is a rentier society?
A rentier society (or rentier economy/state) is a society in which a substantial portion of income and wealth is derived from economic rents — unearned income from owning or controlling scarce assets — rather than from productive activities like manufacturing, innovation, or labor.
Illegal, so I’m not advocating it, he is:
Sony stole what you purchased AGAIN: piracy is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED
Louis Rossmann
2.6M subscribers
523,127 views – Jun 28, 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYxmRaRRdc0