No physical discs for Playstation games (1st & 3rd party) from 2028 onward

[Greycap]

That mentality (lost revenue) is what is the death of everything. It's not lost revenue. Nothing that was already existing was removed. Nothing they had has been taken away.

"Lost ReVeNuE" is corpospeak for "money we didn't make that we feel entitled to and now it's everyone elses problem because we deserve all the money forever"

Tell me you don't know a thing about how business works without telling me, etc. If they know they can't get the revenue they won't spend money into making the product in the first place. If a game is expected to sell ten million copies at $60 each, it can be budgeted at $500 million and make a nice profit. If it's expected to sell five million copies because every other player second hands it, it means a budget of 200 million and then you'll whine because it's low quality. Alternatively, it has to be sold for $120 to make the money to cover the budget, and then you'll whine because it's too expensive. Someone always pays the freeloaders' part and it's either the company owners or those customers who do the initial purchases. In most cases, including this, it's the latter because:

Making games isn't charity. It's hard business, the owners are in it to make money, and if the customers don't pay the company what it costs to make them they'll do it either cheaply or not at all. Nobody runs a business at a loss just so that the customers are happy.

 

[LeMansLambo14]

There could be

What about this?

 

[ZedNinetySix]

Who remembers this? Sony's anti-DRM.

Ever since Sony changed their headquarters to the States and since Genyo Takeda left the company, their practices have been lets say, noticably more American...

Forcing charging full price for a digital copy no matter its age and no alternative is simply predatory. Esepcially since digital copies tend to be often anywhere from 50% to 2~3x more than a physical copy.

Sony HATES this. And the modern gamer has been conditioned to think this predatory behaviour is normal.

The issue surrounding disc drives does not exist. A disc drive for a PS5 cost around $20~$30 to produce. And we've been making disc drives for a LONG time since 1986.

It's simply not expensive at all to implement a disc drive.

They want to remove the free market and relative value to sap as much as they can from you. Simply put.

Just because disc copies are not sold as much as digital copies does not make them redundant, because they still to this day make up a huge portion of the overall sales.

The point is as consumers we deserve options, we truly do deserve to have the option between direct and free market.
The disc allows this. Without the disc, we have no option, we have no free market.

The fact I'm seeing people actually support Sony in this is hilarious.
You're a sucker.
You've been conditioned.

 

[Famine]

Who remembers this?

Anyone who read the first page:

Post in thread 'No physical discs for Playstation games (1st & 3rd party) from 2028 onward'

Jul 1, 2026

This is very obviously going to have negative consequences even for people who already buy digital mainly/only and it's so weird that this isn't being appreciated by some who are acting like they've not bought physical games in a while so this isn't a problem for them.

We've certainly come a very long way from Sony making fun of Microsoft for this exact same thing...

• Famine

The issue surrounding disc drives does not exist.

The issue surrounds the discs: they're dead. Almost everyone's stopped (or is stopping) making them, and almost everyone's stopped making the players, because they're not big enough and the bitrate is too low compared to even the median internet bandwidth in developed countries.

There isn't a successor medium because nobody's bothering (outside of archival applications) to make one as the pace of internet bandwidth is outstripping any medium they could come up with and NAND memory is more than an order of magnitude ahead of that.

That's all great for Sony because it means it can sell you more revokable licences to keep more control over what you "own" and doesn't have to spend any money making physical items, but that's just a convenient byproduct (for them) of the reality here.

 

[ZedNinetySix]

Anyone who read the first page:

Post in thread 'No physical discs for Playstation games (1st & 3rd party) from 2028 onward'

Jul 1, 2026

This is very obviously going to have negative consequences even for people who already buy digital mainly/only and it's so weird that this isn't being appreciated by some who are acting like they've not bought physical games in a while so this isn't a problem for them.

We've certainly come a very long way from Sony making fun of Microsoft for this exact same thing...

• Famine

The issue surrounds the discs: they're dead. Almost everyone's stopped (or is stopping) making them, and almost everyone's stopped making the players, because they're not big enough and the bitrate is too low compared to even the median internet bandwidth in developed countries.

There isn't a successor medium because nobody's bothering m(outside of archival applications) to make one as the pace of internet bandwidth is outstripping any medium they could come up with and NAND memory is more than an order of magnitude ahead of that.

That's all great for Sony because it means it can sell you more revokable licences to keep more control over what you "own" and doesn't have to spend any money making physical items, but that's just a convenient byproduct (for them) of the reality here.

The funny thing is, the market for discs is bigger than you think because everyone is stopping making them, the demand is great still. And they're the only existing medium which will withstand the sands of time longer than digital copies will be allowed to.

They're still selling GT7 for $70 on the PS store despite it being a 4 year old game.

You can pick up the same aging game from Amazon as a disc for under $40 all day long.

Their main priority is removing the free market and relative value. Removing options. This is their main focus. Because it's a big enough threat to them.

 

[Famine]

The funny thing is, the market for discs is bigger than you think because everyone is stopping making them, the demand is great still.

It's not bigger than I think, but it remains buoyant now. But everyone either has or is stopping making them, so regardless of demand (which is well behind streaming) now it's going to go away.

Outside of PS5 (which is a crap media player) and Xbox Series X (which I've never tried playing my BD on), there's so few Blu-ray players left in the market because most even in the original Blu-ray Disc Association have stopped making them. People prefer streaming and don't entirely give a crap about 4K - but even so, median internet bandwidth even in the UK is now 3-4x what's required to stream 4K (and more than twice the bandwidth of a BD player).

This has been ongoing since 2024, and it's only people who've not been paying attention to the home video side of the equation that are shocked by it. Games were probably the last good use-case for the discs, but they're now so bloated they won't fit on them and the majority of AAA games on disc are now either a sub-100GB v1.00 you can install before the "Day One Patch" or just an installer.

There is no successor medium, because there's no economically viable case for it.

They're still selling GT7 for $70 on the PS store despite it being a 4 year old game.

You can pick up the same aging game from Amazon as a disc for under $40 all day long.

Their main priority is removing the free market and relative value. Removing options. This is their main focus. Because it's a big enough threat to them.

Like I said,

That's all great for Sony because it means it can sell you more revokable licences to keep more control over what you "own" and doesn't have to spend any money making physical items, but that's just a convenient byproduct (for them) of the reality here.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

The reason is Blu-ray is a dead format and there is no successor. Physical discs are no longer capable of holding the bloated games (and this will only get worse when they all pursue 8K), and have been left behind on data transfer rates by internet bandwidth and even further behind by SSDs.

This factor has become another reason why I have become rather annoyed with gaming companies (and some gamers) with their pursuit of having more detailed graphics, animations, and high resolutions in everything. On top of the longer development times and higher costs, there's also the fact they essentially become so bloated they no longer can be contained in discs. It's become too much and I think it's ruined gaming.

-----------

On another note, I don't see a point in getting the next gen Playstation if it's just a digital only box versus just upgrading my gaming PC. If I'm gonna use a digital only box for playing games, I think I rather use a PC in that case. Yes, a PS6 will have a lower price perhaps and be easier to use. But those gaps it has over PC are shrinking.

 

[CGT980]

This factor has become another reason why I have become rather annoyed with gaming companies (and some gamers) with their pursuit of having more detailed graphics, animations, and high resolutions in everything. On top of the longer development times and higher costs, there's also the fact they essentially become so bloated they no longer can be contained in discs. It's become too much and I think it's ruined gaming.

-----------

On another note, I don't see a point in getting the next gen Playstation if it's just a digital only box versus just upgrading my gaming PC. If I'm gonna use a digital only box for playing games, I think I rather use a PC in that case. Yes, a PS6 will have price perhaps and be easier to use. But those gaps it has over PC are shrinking.

Especially when the games don't deliver on gameplay and are clearly released as unfinished products. Style over substance. It's one of those trends in modern gaming I've come to dislike so much.

 

[DriveSpark]

The whole disc capacity thing is probably part of the reason but its probably not the main reason, for very large stuff you could use multiple discs (its been done before IIRC). Something like ZSTD compression could also help significantly.

Surely the main reason behind all of this is economic and control.

 

[Famine]

The whole disc capacity thing is probably part of the reason but its probably not the main reason, for very large stuff you could use multiple discs (its been done before IIRC).

It used to happen a lot, particularly before the current form factor...

... but you still hit the bitrate issue. For big game worlds, streaming off a multi-Gbps SSD, or down a many-hundreds-Mbps pipe is preferable to a 100Mbps laser/disc set-up, particularly if you have to stop to swap discs.

 

[UKMikey]

It used to happen a lot, particularly before the current form factor...

... but you still hit the bitrate issue. For big game worlds, streaming off a multi-Gbps SSD, or down a many-hundreds-Mbps pipe is preferable to a 100Mbps laser/disc set-up, particularly if you have to stop to swap discs.

Wouldn't you use the discs just as a distribution medium though and run the game from SSD or over streaming?

 

[VBR]

Who remembers this? Sony's anti-DRM.
View attachment 1549501

Ever since Sony changed their headquarters to the States and since Genyo Takeda left the company, their practices have been lets say, noticably more American...

Forcing charging full price for a digital copy no matter its age and no alternative is simply predatory. Esepcially since digital copies tend to be often anywhere from 50% to 2~3x more than a physical copy.

Sony HATES this. And the modern gamer has been conditioned to think this predatory behaviour is normal.

The issue surrounding disc drives does not exist. A disc drive for a PS5 cost around $20~$30 to produce. And we've been making disc drives for a LONG time since 1986.

It's simply not expensive at all to implement a disc drive.

They want to remove the free market and relative value to sap as much as they can from you. Simply put.

Just because disc copies are not sold as much as digital copies does not make them redundant, because they still to this day make up a huge portion of the overall sales.

The point is as consumers we deserve options, we truly do deserve to have the option between direct and free market.
The disc allows this. Without the disc, we have no option, we have no free market.

The fact I'm seeing people actually support Sony in this is hilarious.
You're a sucker.
You've been conditioned.

Yep. By no longer making discs, they are totally killing the second-hand market, thus gaining a monopoly on PS games, and can charge whatever they want for downloads. Can't believe GT7 is still £69.99 here in the UK!

EDIT: also, making consoles without disc drives pushes people to buy them as they're cheaper, and further cajoles them into the digital-only download ecosystem (which is more expensive for the consumer in the long run).

 

[i386]

Wouldn't you use the discs just as a distribution medium though and run the game from SSD or over streaming?

I remember that the 360 got an update where it could install the game on the hdd and use the disc jsut on start of a game to check if it's a valid copy

 

[Famine]

Wouldn't you use the discs just as a distribution medium though and run the game from SSD or over streaming?

That's what currently happens, but you run into the capacity issue again: the games are getting so bloaty with 4K textures that it's either a <100GB v1.00 game version awaiting a hefty Day One patch or literally a licence key. You're downloading a significant part of the game either way.

But then there's the fact that everyone is stopping making the discs because streaming killed the market for a physical product in the sector. Total DVD/BD/UHD sales last year were a quarter what they were five years ago (although UHD itself increased compared to 2024).

Games are just a casualty of this; there's not going to be the discs to put the games on.

I'm only surprised PlayStation announced it now and not with the PS6 announcement/reveal or letting Xbox take the bad news on first with Helix. Mind you, Xbox has nothing but bad news right now.

 

[renegade an]

There’s perhaps the chance that the EU will force Sony to open their platforms to 3rd party app/ game stores like they did/ try with Apple.

 

[tankuroded]

Multiple lawsuits have been filed regarding this:

• Stichting Massaschade & Consument (Netherlands); $450m (at issue in the article)
• United Kingdom: £2 billion ($2.675 billion)
• United States: class action "granted preliminary approval this spring"

At least two politicians have also took stand: France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Brazil's Erika Hilton.

There’s perhaps the chance that the EU will force Sony to open their platforms to 3rd party app/ game stores like they did/ try with Apple.

Even if EU does that under anti-gatekeeper laws, I am not convinced that is what people wanted and instead insist them continue producing physical discs, but there's the issue of pollution that make EU hesitant against that (however, compare against data centers).

 

[UKMikey]

Multiple lawsuits have been filed regarding this:

• Stichting Massaschade & Consument (Netherlands); $450m (at issue in the article)
• United Kingdom: £2 billion ($2.675 billion)
• United States: class action "granted preliminary approval this spring"

At least two politicians have also took stand: France's Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Brazil's Erika Hilton.

Even if EU does that under anti-gatekeeper laws, I am not convinced that is what people wanted and instead insist them continue producing physical discs, but there's the issue of pollution that make EU hesitant against that (however, compare against data centers).

The pessimist in me suggests it'll be hard to sue a megacorporation with deep pockets and crack lawyers, especially if the reasons they're doing this are technology-based rather than just being spiteful to their userbase. Should this be the case, however, it'd be nice if they had better communication with that userbase regarding the underlying issues driving this change.

 

[Dave A]

Even if EU does that under anti-gatekeeper laws, I am not convinced that is what people wanted and instead insist them continue producing physical discs, but there's the issue of pollution that make EU hesitant against that (however, compare against data centers).

I think there's no chance of that happening, and even if a case were to head in that direction, Sony would simply change track and attack the issue logistically and argue it's simply not going to be possible to use discs going forwards as @UKMikey just said. Arguably that's the point they should have led on anyway.

Really, what people should be after rather than waste time and money on frivolous matters, is a legal guarantee that they will be able to keep their game and play it whenever they want for as long as they want without the corporations removing it or removing access to it from their libraries.

 

[UKMikey]

I think there's no chance of that happening, and even if a case were to head in that direction, Sony would simply change track and attack the issue logistically and argue it's simply not going to be possible to use discs going forwards as @UKMikey just said. Arguably that's the point they should have led on anyway.

Really, what people should be after rather than waste time and money on frivolous matters, is a legal guarantee that they will be able to keep their game and play it whenever they want for as long as they want without the corporations removing it or removing access to it from their libraries.

All of which could lead to massive storage and data centre expansion which brings its own problems. Those libraries have to be stored somewhere.

 

[Dave A]

All of which could lead to massive storage and data centre expansion which brings its own problems. Those libraries have to be stored somewhere.

I think it's unreasonable to expect them to be officially hosted indefinitely and therefore reasonable that there should be some responsibility on the individual consumers to retain data they want to keep. However, I think there should be a fair amount of time following a notice period that a game is de-listed/no longer available to download for those who own it.

What I think is unreasonable, is if a person has the game, has it saved on their storage but then has the license to boot it up revoked remotely so even though they have it, they can't use it. Or worse, has the game remotely uninstalled from their device entirely.

The companies could work with gamers to have games hosted privately after official hosting ends, but that may bring legal complications with it.

 

[sirjim73]

The capacity issue argument is still, in my opinion ******** and the potential answer has ALREADY been found...

Final Fantasy VII - 3 CD roms...
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 3 blu rays done as 3 separate games. Which means it COULD have been released in 3 separate parts on 3 separate blu ray discs. They've just chosen to "early access" the first 2 parts of the game.

I'm still waiting for the "complete edition" when it comes out at a later date.

If it can be done for FFVII TWICE, it can be done for any game.

I should add that I've only bought digital games the last 3/4 years, so I'm part of the reason physical games are ending.

However, I am still SOLELY buying physical for TV/movies because:

1. I refuse to spend my life switching between 1 month subscriptions to rent the one show a year I want on Netflix, Disney, P+ etc and
2. Licences for TV content streaming tend to be short term e.g. a year.
3. I like to rewatch stuff 2/3 years later which you usually can't do with streaming because of 2 above.

 

[Famine]

The capacity issue argument is still, in my opinion ********

It's not the whole issue (on the gaming side), but a part of it - and it will become more a part of it if 8K starts to become a thing in the relentless pursuit of looking real while playing like crap.

The multi-disc solution won't work for all games either. For playable movies it's fine, but it won't work for games with very large, seamless worlds that you go through without loading scenes, and I can't imagine it'd be all that good for stuff like the next Gran Turismo, requiring you to swap discs to play a track in a Daily Race that isn't on the other disc.

But it's also not really relevant. Discs are done now, with streaming ripping the rug from underneath the home cinema market (as I said, a quarter what it was five years ago) even at 4K because the average person has more than enough headroom to stream a 4K movie while someone else in the house is also doing that. I also keep forgetting 5G, which can (but won't necessarily) hit 10Gbps. All the people making discs in and players in the home cinema space have either already stopped or will; Disney doesn't make Blu-ray discs any more. Disney!

Gaming is the last use-case for the disc format, and given that Blu-ray bitrates are well behind FTTP and SSDs with games now not fitting on the single disc, diminishing too - and we already kinda know the next Xbox won't have a disc drive either. PlayStation either needs to take up sole production of discs just for games (of which only a quarter are bought on disc, making it not financially viable) or join everyone else in cutting discs out entirely.

And yeah, I hate it.

Again, I think PlayStation's excuse is horse****, because it doesn't demarcate older/discounted titles from newer/full-price ones in its "full game software" sales figures and they also show that when they sell more generally they sell more physical copies.

Just come out and explain that discs are dead and that you'd love to support them for longer because fans really appreciate a good limited physical edition - or better yet, do it when you reveal the PS6. Let Xbox take the bad news hit when it reveals Helix.


For a laugh, I looked up how expensive a physical card with at least a higher bitrate than Blu-ray that could hold at least 150GB (for GTA6) would be, to give an idea of how expensive it would be retaining a physical format without the issues of Blu-ray.

Even a 256GB SD 8.0 card (300Mbps) is over £200, although a CFexpress A 4.0 (2.0Gbps) would be better and still just about £140.

Interestingly, I recall that the proprietary Xbox Series HDD add-ons are CFexpress B-based (4.0Gbps).

 

[kjb]

Whoever okayed this almost a week after they deleted a bunch of movies from user's accounts needs to be fired. How do you announce hey we are going to stop making discs right after that? It's like they felt like they hadn't pissed off their customers enough so let's really get them riled up

 

[Miroku]

I would gladly support digital gaming if the games were $5 to 20.00CDN.
Cause I switched my PS4 and collection to digital because I re-bought the games for that amount and sold off my physical games and ended up winning in the end. (However after this news, I want to rebuy some of my PS4 games back on physical haha)

But if the games are at $90.00CDN on launch....no way am I paying that much money for a game that I can't get a refund on or sell to someone if I don't like it.
I made that mistake with Forza 5. I bought it on "sale" for $55.00cdn and didn't like the game. Well now I'm stuck with that horrible game and have no ways to refund it or sell it. So I learned to never do that mistake ever again.

Basically what this would do to people like me is make it so I'll never buy new games anymore unless there on sales for under $20.00, which they probably won't be anymore since there will be zero competition without a physical market.

The only game I would buy full price would be Gran Turismo 8....but if the PS6 has no disc drive...than I wouldn't even buy a PS6 and basically GT7 would be my last modern Gran Turismo game.

 

[Nexus]

The capacity issue argument is still, in my opinion ******** and the potential answer has ALREADY been found...

Final Fantasy VII - 3 CD roms...
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 3 blu rays done as 3 separate games. Which means it COULD have been released in 3 separate parts on 3 separate blu ray discs. They've just chosen to "early access" the first 2 parts of the game.

I'm still waiting for the "complete edition" when it comes out at a later date.

If it can be done for FFVII TWICE, it can be done for any game.

My PC copy of Need For Speed Most Wanted was spread across four discs. Whenever I wanted to play the game, I popped in disc one for the licence verification - the game itself was installed on the hard disk. Similar to what @UKMikey said, the discs were predominantly used as a distribution method. (I'm assuming current consoles already work in a similar way, but I haven't owned a console since the seventh generation)

I don't think a GTA V on PC situation would be a good user experience (7 DVDs for the single-player installation), but you'd think that most game developers could fit their games on (at most) two BD-100 discs for installation purposes. And with the cost of storage nowadays, there'd ideally be more focus on trimming down the bloated size of games.

 

[UKMikey]

My PC copy of Need For Speed Most Wanted was spread across four discs. Whenever I wanted to play the game, I popped in disc one for the licence verification - the game itself was installed on the hard disk. Similar to what @UKMikey said, the discs were predominantly used as a distribution method. (I'm assuming current consoles already work in a similar way, but I haven't owned a console since the seventh generation)

I think my DiRT Rally 2.0 disk was a GOTY edition to which all the patches had presumably been applied creating a final version when copied to disk. I could be wrong and it initiated a one time download though, not really sure. I believe it was an Xbox One or One X version but I only ever played it on Series X.

At any rate I purchased the game several years after release so I'm not sure if updates and Day One patches were an issue. Presumably this is the physical version which disk proponents are hoping to be able to sell onto other players.

I can't remember the last time I bought a game which required disk swapping just to play the game once it'd been installed to SSD.

The "disks aren't being manufactured any more due to lack of demand" argument is more compelling to me than the "multi-disk SKUs are unworkable because the whole game isn't present on the console or PC" or "Blu-Ray disks have a lower bitrate than SSs and streaming" arguments as a reason for publishers abandoning physical media.

 

[RandomCarGuy17]

The multi-disc solution won't work for all games either. For playable movies it's fine, but it won't work for games with very large, seamless worlds that you go through without loading scenes, and I can't imagine it'd be all that good for stuff like the next Gran Turismo, requiring you to swap discs to play a track in a Daily Race that isn't on the other disc.

You mean it couldn't work even as a content install format for multiple discs? Like how in Forza Motorsport 3 & 4 where there's a 2nd disc for content install, but then you can just keep running the game on disc 1 after that.

 

[Nacho Libre]

I'm thinking this announcement, which is likely to be irreversible going forward, would have gone better if Sony also announced some form of compensation or alternate way to move physical disc contents into the next generation of their console.

But, if you want corpos and their lawyers to contort and have them frothing their mouths, just say the word "compensation".

EDIT: I will not comment further on this matter. As it has been expounded quite clearly here, when streaming appeared, we stopped driving to the Blockbuster and caring about late fees, video rental stores went down = DVD production went down; when Xbox's Game Pass appeared, many people stopped purchasing physical games (including me), and Sony and Nintendo launched their own online subscription models.

It was Steam that helped killed the physical format for games on PC, coupled with faster storage devices and improved connection speeds. My last laptop didn't have a CD drive and that did not bother me at all. Then, during the pandemic, the world streamed its shows and movies, and it almost killed theaters. In the end, they won't cater to the 10% hanging there. It's just a heartless business decision, but in the end, a business decision. And GTA6, which sold boxes with codes will just confirm it's the right business decision. I'm sorry if I sound like Arnold Royalton.

 

[art3mis]

The capacity issue argument is still, in my opinion ******** and the potential answer has ALREADY been found...

Final Fantasy VII - 3 CD roms...
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 3 blu rays done as 3 separate games. Which means it COULD have been released in 3 separate parts on 3 separate blu ray discs. They've just chosen to "early access" the first 2 parts of the game.

I'm still waiting for the "complete edition" when it comes out at a later date.

If it can be done for FFVII TWICE, it can be done for any game.

I should add that I've only bought digital games the last 3/4 years, so I'm part of the reason physical games are ending.

However, I am still SOLELY buying physical for TV/movies because:

1. I refuse to spend my life switching between 1 month subscriptions to rent the one show a year I want on Netflix, Disney, P+ etc and
2. Licences for TV content streaming tend to be short term e.g. a year.
3. I like to rewatch stuff 2/3 years later which you usually can't do with streaming because of 2 above.

FF7, FF8, FF9 were all on multiple disks. FFS though here's the simple "fix". SD slot. Sell games on a SD stick. 100% those are big enough to hold the entire game. They won't because the entire purpose of this is to kill the 2nd hand market, kill used games entirely, and permanently monopolize distribution and ensure that prices are never lower than "full" at all times.

 

[Famine]

FFS though here's the simple "fix". SD slot. Sell games on a SD stick. 100% those are big enough to hold the entire game.

From a cursory check you may not like what that does to the prices of games.

For a laugh, I looked up how expensive a physical card with at least a higher bitrate than Blu-ray that could hold at least 150GB (for GTA6) would be, to give an idea of how expensive it would be retaining a physical format without the issues of Blu-ray.

Even a 256GB SD 8.0 card (300Mbps) is over £200, although a CFexpress A 4.0 (2.0Gbps) would be better and still just about £140.

Maybe there's cheaper options out there (are read-only SD cards a thing and are they cheaper?).