Amidst all the uproar over Sony’s decision to stop producing discs for PlayStation consoles, I’ve started seeing an interesting (if relatively minor) counter to the popular narrative. In an attempt to perhaps explain why Sony made the decision, or maybe even to try to placate everyone since folks have got so mad, news stories and analyst comments have started popping up pointing to abysmal physical game sales.
The stories are all slightly different, and they’re rarely this blunt, but the general implied message is the same: why are you all so mad, nobody is buying discs anymore! Here’s the data!
People are not this mad because disc-based games are going away. Well, I mean, they are mad that discs are going away, a decision that has consequences for everything from personal ownership to the second-hand and borrowed games markets. But I don’t think the scale and ferocity of the response, with change.org petitions numbering in the hundreds of thousands of supporters and calls for boycotts of PlayStation products, is all down to this one decision.
I think people have just had enough. Of everything. And it’s this physical media move that has broken the camel’s back.
That’s Australian economist, journalist and content creator Chris Kohler (not that Chris Kohler), with a short video he released the other day that hit me pretty hard. Firstly because I was surprised to see the news hitting mainstream circles like this, but also because, perhaps because he’s an outside voice, Kohler was able to see the forest for the trees by linking the disc decision to digital subscriptions and lootboxes and everything else and just call it all what it is: a “toxic economy”.
This stuff has all been pissing us all off, for years. From horse armour through to Roblox, to be alive and playing video games over the last 20 years has been to suffer a succession of indignities as major publishers and platform holders conspire, continuously, to make everything worse. AAA games have gone mad, business decisions are increasingly unhinged, mobile gaming’s economy should be illegal, layoffs are kneecapping our favourite studios and predatory economic practices stalk our every move, regardless of the platform. We’re all frogs, and the water has been getting a little warmer each year.
I saw a discussion on Reddit the other day, where someone who was playing the Black Flag remake–which we don’t need, that’s another problem–noticed there were advertisements on the game’s pause screen. The reaction from longtime fans? “Been that way since Origins my man”. The extent to which this ridiculous state of affairs had been normalised by these people floored me.
Gaming in 2026 feels like being trapped in the trash compactor in Star Wars, the walls slowly moving in on us, not fast enough to kill us outright, but fast enough to make the tension obvious, the shortening width of the room constantly apparent. It fucking sucks, man. All of it. The monster under the water sucks, the walls trying to kill us sucks, the junk that might crush us before the walls can, the fact it’s on the Death Star, the fact there is a Death Star, it’s all bad.
(I know this is also what it feels like to simply be alive at the moment, since the same forces are at work everywhere from the workplace to the grocery store, but this is a blog about video games.)
So if you’re an analyst or games industry executive and you’re still wondering why everyone is so mad about what looks like a rational, sensible business decision, consider maybe we’re mad about all kinds of stuff, and it’s just the discs that made us all realise how far the walls have closed in around us.
It's Hater Week here on Aftermath. This week we’re letting the hate flow through us by examining what it means to be a hater (and… a lover?), venting about some of our biggest pet peeves in games and life, and giving others a space to do the same.
