“Play Has No Limits – except you will only use our storefront and you’ll be happy with our price increases and you’ll be forced to use a PS account for games that shouldn’t need one and you’ll thank us when we remove your purchased movies” – Sony 2026.
We’ve all heard the news recently – that Sony is removing physical disks as an option from all newly released games starting in 2028. This has sent waves throughout the industry, with companies openly mocking Sony’s strange decision. People smarter than me have already addressed Sony’s seemingly exaggerated claims that digital sales account for 80% of total sales on the console.
I know there are quite a lot of people who do not necessarily see this as an issue, most likely seeing it as the same “technological leap” as the movie industry has been going through for years now with streaming services and digital copies outpacing physical sales.
However, it isn’t quite as simple as this. Not owning your own library aside, as that’s a topic for another day, Sony is pushing for a monopoly on the console market. We already know that it has a huge advantage over Xbox in terms of sales and market value, so why was this the next thing they decided to do? Cutting out the ability to purchase second-hand copies of games causes Sony to cement a monopoly far beyond what it already holds. Combine that with the extremely annoying habit that they have in terms of only reducing the price of a Deluxe Edition of a game, and then we have a situation where if you’re not willing to pay the launch price, then you’re purely at Sony’s mercy for when they decide to include it in one of their underwhelming sales.
I’ve seen comparisons of this to the PC gaming industry, where physical media hasn’t been present for years. Whilst this is entirely true, it’s not entirely comparable to the plans that Sony has in place. We all know Steam has a mega monopoly on the PC space but the difference between them and the console giant is a very simple one – customers, for the most part, are more than content to let that monopoly exist. Regardless of this, there are a tonne of options on PC to buy games, with multiple launchers, storefronts, third-party key sellers and more. The PlayStation store ecosystem does not have any of this.
We’ve even had new information from Jason Schreier, with him stating that Sony already considers that its digital player base is large enough to outpace the other portion who are fighting back against the physical decision. He also noted that for a retailer selling a first-party title, Sony can earn up to 54% more when selling that same game digitally. For third-party titles, the incentive for other publishers to go digital is that they themselves receive slightly higher profit margins, whilst Sony reaps what would have been the “retail fee” from them. Whatever they state to be the reason to phase out physical media, the motivation is purely financial.
Are we really okay with our options being limited to a single market and the ownership of games at risk, all so Sony can boast an additional profit gain on every sale?
Recently, they announced that 551 movies would be removed from PlayStation, from both the store and the libraries of users who had purchased them. This can be seen as a direct reason as to why we should highly oppose the above physical game removal. If Sony has already stated that they are okay with taking customers’ movies away, who’s to say they won’t do it with games? The precedent has clearly already been set and games are next on the chopping block.
They’ve also stated in the past two weeks that accounts can be fully deleted on their end after just 3 years of inactivity. In the grand scheme of things, this is such a short time frame – it’s not even the length of a single generation of consoles.
The removal of physical games is not the only controversy that the gaming giant has brought to its own door. As well as the above, Sony has built up quite the track record of decisions that prioritise their bottom line over the people actually playing their games. This is only recently:
- Helldivers 2 – Sony attempted to force a mandatory PSN account requirement for all PC players, even in countries that the PlayStation Network was not officially supported. This locked out a tonne of players that had already bought the game.
- PS5 storage reduction – The digital edition was quietly downgraded from 1TB to 825GB with no announcement whatsoever. Price stayed the same.
- Introduced DRM to validate a license within 15-30 days after purchase. The console must be online or players are locked out of games. Not a huge deal but it has the potential for issues.
- Began a dynamic pricing experiment on the PlayStation Store, offering variable discounts on titles for different users.
- Price hikes – Both the PS5 hardware and PS Plus have seen multiple price increases in the last couple of years.
- PC exclusivity reversal – Having previously committed to bringing titles to PC, Sony has now reversed course and made future releases console exclusive once again.
- Concord – A game that burned through an enormous budget for Sony to chase a trend. It then flopped spectacularly, pulled within two weeks and the studio closed. All showing that they do not want to take the brunt of the fallout when it goes wrong.
Sony has shown time and time again that they do not care about a single one of its players, yet they somehow get defended by many at every turn due to the games they release. Why are we allowing them to beat us down at every possible point just to get the chance to play Wolverine? We all know it’s a business and businesses must make important decisions, but the things Sony has been doing are increasingly hostile to the very customers they rely on.
I’ve been a PlayStation fan since the PS1 and don’t get me wrong, a part of me still is that same fan. But the company that once felt like it was built for the players, hence their tagline, now feels like it’s built around extracting as much from them as possible. Console dominance was always going to change them, as it does in every industry when that giant gets too comfortable. The difference here is that at least some of the other business giants pretend to care. Sony has stopped bothering with even that.