What we will lose when Sony goes full discless

Last week, Sony announced that “in response to shifting trends,” it will discontinue production of physical discs for new games in 2028. “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,” it said, describing it as a transition that will “enable” it “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

In the days since, the gaming community has been awash with reactions, most of which have been negative. Yes, there’s a sense of inevitability to the announcement. Several years worth of research have demonstrated the extent to which physical media has been outpaced by digital purchases. But despite this and the decline of physical games retail, denial this day would come has always persisted among the most nostalgic of gamers.

Is it based on data or just profit?

For while there’s a vocal desire among gamers for the continued existence of physical media, a vast majority of casual consumers have shifted over to more convenient methods of games distribution. Sony made that apparent with the data it shared about its own game sales. Which isn’t to say that an opinion is invalid simply because it is held by a minority, but big corporations respond to the reality of the market, for better or worse.

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The general criticism from serious pundits to casual observers has focused on ownership. In an all digital future, consumers don’t really “own” the media that they buy. At any moment, platform holders like Sony, Microsoft and even Valve and Nintendo can take away your digital purchase. These fears were legitimized by Sony’s removal of hundreds of films from users’ PlayStation libraries just a week ago, a day before the announcement, and it is also not the first time they’ve done this.

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Digital isn’t a real archive

The continuing existence of disc-based media ideally provides some refuge from digital libraries, with the prevailing notion being that something remains on your shelf even if Sony chooses to delist it from their own platform. But when many games, including this year’s much anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6, are shipping as codes not discs in the box, it appears that physical purchases will gradually cease to provide the aforementioned security to consumers.

And that is actually a bad thing. Personally, I actually like owning games and media digitally, for reasons relating to convenience and a lack of interest in amassing a physical hoard. But I understand that isn’t for everyone. Having control and ownership of what you buy is something you should be able to opt out of rather than being a decision made for you by the likes of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Yet even if we concede that the semi-digital present is to become the all-digital future, what will happen is a narrowing of the medium’s ability to make new generations of players. Those of us with gray hairs or bad backs will remember that back in the day, if you didn’t have a lot of money, you didn’t buy big budget games off the shelf on release day. Instead, you discovered games by borrowing them from friends or digging stuff out of the used games bin. Or you’d pick up a title you didn’t intend to as part of a buy 2 for 1 deal.

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It’s also about the ecosystem

These “secondary markets,” can’t exist without physical games. If you want friends to try out a game on your Xbox account, you’d have to consider the dicey notion of giving them your login details. If you want to try out a game you’re uncertain about, you used to be able just look up forums or eBay or dig through clearance bins. A digital exclusive release puts you at the mercy of whatever price the platform holder decides to set. Do you know how many Activision Blizzard games I haven’t bought on Battle.net because they stay above $30 forever?

Physical media let young and poor folks try different kinds of games with reduced financial risk, training future generations of players with diverse tastes and appetite for whatever experiments and innovations the industry had to offer. These days the only way to play at a lower cost or reduced risk is to just follow your friends where they are on games like Fortnite and Minecraft or mess around with low-cost ‘friendslop’ like Among Us and Lethal Company and the recent breakout hit, Meccha Chameleon.

There’s no getting around the fact that digital media is so much more convenient, but that’s only if you think of videogames as simply being the code that runs on your device. The big video game corporations certainly seem to think so.  The fight for the future of games isn’t just about physical media, its about the excess power that these companies wield. Their desire to diminish the rights of consumers, to revoke access to the art they publish and to degrade of the products we pay for assures us that they won’t stop at just discs.

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