I'm Disgusted by Sony's Disc Statement, and by the Gamers Defending It

Sony’s CFO used the word “cautiously” twice in one answer about a decision the company had already announced, dated, and locked.

Here is Lin Tao on the Q1 FY2026 earnings call on July 31, as transcribed by Gematsu: “So when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward.” Caution with a deadline on it is not caution. January 2028 was set on July 1 and nothing in the month since moved it a day.

The line that actually matters came right after, when Tao was asked about the backlash. “At this point in time, we are not seeing any impact on our business,” per Forbes’ write-up of the call. That was aimed at shareholders, and for shareholders it is good news. Physical software brought in roughly $128 million in the quarter ending June 30 against $1.2 billion in digital software and $1.83 billion in add-on content, per This Week In Video Games’ breakdown of the investor materials. Downloads were 82% of full-game units. The angriest month PlayStation has had in years didn’t register on the balance sheet, and the CFO said as much to the people who own the stock.

I wrote about the announcement itself a few days before the call, mostly about the opening it hands Xbox. The call changed my read of it. Sony ran the numbers on a month of outrage, found that it hadn’t shown up in them, and reported that to its shareholders as a good result.

I buy physical for console games whenever the option exists, and my PlayStation only gets switched on for exclusives. The last game I bought for it was Astro Bot. When Silksong launched digital-only in September 2025 I bought it digitally on Steam, because there was nothing else on offer, and I’ve been waiting on the disc ever since. Fangamer finally has it dated for October 16 of this year, with a 32-page manual and a fold-out map of Pharloom in the box. That’s a thirteen-month wait for the version I actually wanted, and I’d do it again. What bothers me is that waiting only works while the cutoff hasn’t hit. Nothing releasing after January 2028 gets a disc later.

The people arguing Sony’s side for free

The disc-collector fury I expected. What I didn’t expect was the volume of gamers showing up, unpaid, to explain why the people losing something should be quiet about it. Three arguments keep surfacing, and every one of them costs the person making it.

The most common is that most people buy digital anyway, so who cares. That reading depends on which number you pick up. Physical was 3% of PlayStation’s roughly $31.5 billion in games and services revenue last fiscal year, per Sony’s own reporting as covered by Kotaku, which sounds terminal right up until you notice the figure books full revenue on first-party games and only royalties on third-party ones. Counted by units, physical was about 24% of PlayStation game sales, 73 million discs. Same year, same company, two very different pictures of who this affects. And “most people prefer digital” is a strange thing to measure inside a store that decides what gets a physical release in the first place. It gets stranger when you remember how people actually got these consoles. During the pandemic shortage you bought whichever PS5 you could find in stock, and I know two people who wanted the disc model and went home with a Digital Edition because that was what showed up. Every game either of them has bought since counts in Sony’s column as a preference for digital. Sony has kept its thumb on that scale since: the PS5 Pro shipped in 2024 with no drive in it at all, and the $79.99 add-on that fixes that spent months sold out at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target while resellers asked $250 for one.

Then there’s the one that stuck with me, which was someone arguing that GOG being DRM-free is pointless. That concedes the whole thing before the argument starts. A store whose entire pitch is that you get an installer that works in twenty years with no client, no login, and no company left standing is, in this view, wasting everyone’s time. Somebody talked that person into believing non-ownership is the weather.

The third one is Steam, and it comes up more than the other two combined. PC went all-digital, Valve owns the market, nobody riots, so the PlayStation version of this is fine. Everything in that sentence is accurate up to the conclusion, which gets the reason PC works exactly backwards.

On PC, if Valve raises prices, delists something, locks your account, or decides a category is more trouble than it’s worth, GOG is right there. So are Epic, itch.io, Humble, Fanatical, and publishers who will sell you a key directly. Several of those hand you a file or a key that runs without their client alive at all. Steam is dominant because it keeps winning, against competitors that are one browser tab away, every single year. That pressure is why Steam has refunds, why offline mode works, why the client stopped acting like adware a decade ago. Valve behaves because Valve can be left.

On a PS6, the PlayStation Store is the only door. Not the biggest door, the only one. Sony sets every price, runs every sale, takes its cut of every transaction, decides what stays purchasable and what quietly stops being purchasable, and owns the account the entire library hangs from. There is no rival storefront to defect to and, after January 2028, no disc to fall back on. Nothing in that arrangement has to stay good, because nothing happens to Sony if it doesn’t. The used market goes too: CNBC put the global secondhand game trade at around $7 billion, and that entire economy runs on a physical object changing hands.

It already happened, and it happens again on September 1

None of this is a slippery-slope hypothetical. On September 1, Sony removes 551 StudioCanal movies and TV shows from the video libraries of PlayStation users in the UK and Europe. Terminator 2, Total Recall, Mulholland Drive, per Game Informer’s report. People bought those. There are no refunds, because Sony’s terms have always said a purchase is a license and a license ends when the contract behind it does. The notice surfaced on June 25, six days before Sony announced the end of discs.

It’s also a rerun. Sony pulled StudioCanal titles from German and Austrian accounts in 2022. In December 2023 it listed 1,318 Discovery items for deletion, including things like MythBusters and Deadliest Catch that customers had paid for, then reversed course three weeks later after the backlash and signed a new agreement. People still quote that reversal as reassurance, though what saved those shows was Warner Bros. Discovery agreeing to re-sign. The purchases had nothing to do with it. Same store, same terms, same accounts, and this year StudioCanal didn’t re-sign.

Games are harder to yank than films, and Sony would take a genuine beating for deleting one outright. Delisting is the quieter version and it happens constantly, and once the store is the only channel, a delisted game is a game that no longer exists for new buyers at any price. No shelf, no eBay listing, no borrowing it from a friend. Whether a game from 2029 is still playable in 2045 comes down to whether some licensing agreement kept getting renewed for sixteen years.

I have a shelf of retro games there is no legal way to buy today. My favorite game of all time is Pokémon Emerald. I replay it around once a year on a modded GBA. The cartridge came out in May 2005, which puts it on shelves before console storefronts were a thing that existed. Emerald is older than the entire idea of buying a console game by logging into something, and it still boots, because it is an object in my hand. Nintendo has never added it to Switch Online’s GBA library or released another way to buy it. Twenty-one years of uninterrupted access to a game, none of it granted by a company and none of it revocable by one. That’s the whole argument, and it fits in a pocket. This is exactly what Sony is trying to end.

Sony isn’t really my worry either, or not only Sony. Sony is the first one through the door, and the earnings call matters more than the blog post did because every other hardware maker just watched a competitor kill physical media and take no measurable damage for it. Microsoft is already rumored to be weighing a next-gen console with no drive in it. Nintendo has spent years moving its back catalog into subscription access and paid re-downloads. If the lesson from the past month is that the outrage was loud and cost nothing, all three of them learned it on the same day. That’s the part I can’t get past. One company’s decision I can route around by not buying its console. An industry that has collectively worked out the decision is safe leaves nowhere to move to.

So buy the disc while there is a disc. Buy from the stores that hand you a file. And when somebody tells you the backlash is pointless because the majority went digital years ago, be clear about what they’re actually asking for: one store, one price-setter, one company holding the library and the account and the off switch, with nowhere to walk when it decides to squeeze. Sony’s CFO stood in front of investors and confirmed that none of the shouting costs the company anything. The people defending it are why that’s true.