Sony will stop making discs for new PlayStation games in 2028, the company announced Wednesday morning and GameFile first reported. The change will affect both first and third-party games.
"This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs," Sony wrote in a blog post. "This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today."
It's not necessarily a surprising move– a recent Sony financial report noted that most people buy the company's games digitally. And the company's announcement comes on the heels of Rockstar announcing it won't release a disc for Grand Theft Auto 6, which led many to wonder if more of the industry would follow its lead. Sony notes in its post that its digital-only games will still be sold at stores, meaning you could still head down to your local game shop and buy essentially an empty box, but it could certainly spell a blow to retailers and to the used game market, as well as anyone who likes to feel like they own the thing they went to the store to pay for.
That sense of ownership has been at the front of movements like Stop Killing Games, as well as a 2025 California law that requires companies to make clear that digital purchases are licenses, rather than outright ownership. However, with disc-based games increasingly requiring further downloads anyway, what you're actually buying when you buy a box with a disc in it, and how much permanent ownership that disc really grants you, has become more and more murky.
The change also raises challenges for game preservation. Responding to questions about GTA 6, Library Director of the Video Game History Foundation Phil Salvador told Aftermath that digital-only games don't
have as much of an impact on professional game preservation work as you might expect. Even true physical game releases are now often tied to updates, patches, and internet-enabled features. A game like Grand Theft Auto 6 will undoubtedly have a day one patch or significant updates, to the point where even if there was data on a physical release, it will not accurately reflect the game that people will actually play. Because the industry has been trending this way for decades, preservationists and museum professionals have been exploring other methods to preserve their data that go beyond putting a disc on a shelf.
GameFile notes that this also raises the question of whether future PlayStation consoles will come with a disc drive. Phil Spencer told the outlet in 2024 that "Gaming consoles themselves have kind of become the last consumer electronic device that has a drive," while also noting that said drives increase production costs. As someone who no longer owns anything with a disc drive beyond a PS4 with, well, a broken disc drive, this definitely impacts my ability to watch the pile of DVDs I still own, as well as play the PlayStation games I own that I only have on discs. Game consoles function as multi-purpose devices for plenty of people in that way, and potentially removing one of those purposes, alongside consoles' rising costs, could make them a harder sell for some people.
GameFile also notes that the move away from discs could be a good thing for game developers in some ways, with studios no longer having to rush to finalize games to disc production timelines. GameFile writes that "projects may gain weeks of development time, in the event delivery deadlines for platform approval move closer to release date."
All of that remains to be seen, but what seems certain is that this change will make it harder for games to live outside retail transactions and PlayStation's ecosystem. Beyond the ramifications to the used games market, you also can't lend a friend a digital code, and they probably wouldn't be your friend anymore if you lent them an empty box to stare at. It further narrows the ways games move through the real world into a solitary transaction between a player and Sony's digital storefront, a situation that surely stands to benefit Sony, but not so much the rest of us.
