Announced today via PlayStation’s official blog, Sony has effectively put to bed when and where physical media for their new video games will die, and it is January 2028. While this isn’t exactly shocking, it does sting. And with Xbox effectively selling discs with encryption keys for their first party titles, the writing is on the wall for their fate as well.
This comes in the advent of what is a general market shift to digital games as a primary priority over physical ones, and the numbers aren’t even close. It’s reported that 85% of PlayStation’s first-party titles are sold digitally over physical copies, and it’s a rate that is increasing. PlayStation also clarified that any game released before 2028 will not be affected.
Does All-Digital Make Sense?
Given market trends and the ever increasing size of game files going into the next generation, this unfortunately makes sense and it’s a cost maneuver that can save the company millions of dollars. Take GTA VI for example, which is a code-in-a-box physical release that has already sold approximately 40 million units. Ignoring sales tax for this exercise, and using the standard edition at $80, that gives us $3,200,000,000 ($3.2 billion) in revenue.
If the cost of discs production en masse is $3 for 3 discs (I’m just guessing the game is this large on UHD Blu-Rays), that is nearly $13,000,000 in lost revenue for disc copies. Adjusting for the 85%/15% split, that’s $2,000,000 in lost revenue plus whatever physical copies that would be sitting on store shelves. This is just a thought exercise and real numbers will heavily vary.
Should we feel bad for them since they lose all that money to maintain physical copies? Absolutely not… but they do. So When Sony says they simply mean to “… adapt to consumer trends…” it’s just them saying they want to maximize profit in a way C-Corp investors love.
An All Digital PS6
2028 is a very specific year, and believe it or not, we are fully in “Next Gen” discussions as we look to transition from the PS5 era to the PS6. The AI bubble and RAM scarcity appears to be a long term issue, so it’s rumored that development of PlayStation’s next-gen offering was pushed to 2028-2029 to weather the storm of bloated hardware costs.
We will see what the future brings, but it seems inevitable with this news, bloated game sizes, increasing hardware costs, and market trends that the PS6 will ship as a digital only device with an attachable disc drive.
PlayStation was one of the last holdouts for true physical media, where their first party offerings shipped the entire 1.0 version of a game on a disc that can be installed and played completely offline. It appears we are looking at the end of an era. Maybe my PS5 Pro will get more life in it after all.
