After the bombshell – learning the price point and the lack of a physical disc for Grand Theft Auto VI – the gaming community got hit again with epic news which might even recontextualize the GTA 6 news. July 1st 2026, might be one of the most impactful days in the history of video gaming in a year that each week seems to shake the confidence of professionals and gamers alike. PlayStation, per their blog, early in the morning, announced that in January 2028, they will no longer be making discs for their games. Per The PlayStation Blog –
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.
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. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.
We’ll continue to prioritize our resources to drive innovation in how players can access games and provide choices as to where players prefer to purchase new games, whether that’s at retailers or PlayStation Store. We remain committed to delivering a world-class gaming experience to our fans and we thank you for your continued support.
The Sony PlayStation 5 is the current leader of this generation in sales, with over 93 million units sold globally. PlayStation has become the standard to a degree for most modern gamers for what video games are. Yet now they are deciding essentially for the industry that the future is completely digital. Now I’m a realist: close to 80% of games are now bought digitally. A lot of people I know only buy games digitally. It’s something I lost faith in years ago. Back in the PS3/360/Wii era of gaming, there were games I purchased during that time that I lost access to as I upgraded consoles. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was re-released then, along with arcade classic beat ’em ups from Konami, The Simpsons, and X-Men that I was excited about owning.
MvC2 is one of the most iconic fighting games ever and still has some of the best interpretations of Marvel characters to this day. It was exciting to play this game online, no less on a current console, without having to drag out my Sega Dreamcast or PlayStation 2. Then one day, Marvel and Capcom were no longer getting along, and the license ended. These games I bought were locked to the consoles they were on. While that might feel like no big deal, the ability to redownload those games went away as well. If anything happened to these consoles that would make them nonfunctional, I would lose these games. These games that I thought I was buying to own.
This happened more and more after the Nintendo Virtual Console program ended and was not carried over onto their Switch-era consoles, to apps that I bought on iOS disappearing over time with no way to redownload on other devices (again, for me, Marvel vs Capcom 2). I decided to hedge my bets on buying the discs. If something happens, I still have the disc or cartridge. Even if I have to play a buggy version on some future date on a console or emulated hardware, I feel I own it in some way. I feel this way about music, about television, about film, and about comics.
There was some hope in 2020 when the XBOX Series X/S and PS5 were released. The PS5 was backward compatible with the PS4 games, and MS pushed hard, making their new system able to play original XBOX games on disc on the new console. In the push for game preservation, we might’ve seen the end of the companies’ care. Old leaders are gone, many mistakes were made, and billions were lost, so now it feels like they want to take things away even as they constantly increase prices. Future consoles might cost over a thousand dollars, and single games are rising to eighty dollars; it’s becoming harder and harder to enjoy this medium.
Right after the first announcement, PlayStation dropped that they are closing the PS3 and PS Vita stores later this year. Again, per their blog:
After nearly two decades of supporting the PS3 console generation, we wanted to let you know we will be closing the PlayStation Store on PS3, as well as on PS Vita. PlayStation Store on PS3 will close in select markets starting this year, followed by global closures for PS3 and PS Vita next year. That means new content purchases will no longer be possible once the PlayStation Store closes on these devices. To ease the transition, players will still be able to download previously purchased content after the closing date for the foreseeable future.
That “foreseeable future” should be something that should stick out to you, as only last week it was announced that over 550 movie and TV titles will be deleted from their libraries with no refunds or credits given to the customers affected. There’s nothing to stop PlayStation from having the same issues with games in the future. These relationships with games publishers and the platforms change just as much as any other piece of media does. If you think movies leaving services like Netflix or HBO Max are annoying, or songs magically changing on Spotify because of some unknown rights holder, just wait- it’s coming for your games too.
What does this mean for people who buy used games? How about the rentals (yes, GameFly still exists)? Does this essentially kill the gaming section of retail stores, or will they all become the Nintendo section, like it was forty years ago? Physical games go on sale, but digital ones don’t really. They might tell you differently, but Prime Day just happened, and most of those games that were on sale there were full price on PlayStation Store. With this change, it means they share less of the profits of the games with anyone besides themselves and the game publisher. If it’s their own, it’s all profits for them. We get no breaks.
While some think this is the death knell for GameStop, I’d take a pause on that. While it will affect them and we might see more store closings, GameStop can pivot to being a national chain of Retro Gaming stores. Here is where you can buy all the old games and systems they’ve been purchasing from people for decades. They can also shift to PC gaming support along with their already existing push into collectibles. What this does, though, is affect how you get access to games. It gives you fewer choices, costs you more, and is on subscription.
I don’t know how this is all going to shake out here, but the costs of making games are rising. The AI-induced memory crisis and the collapse of XBOX with thousands of layoffs happening at a surprising clip. This is just another hit the gaming industry doesn’t need, as many people fear that it’s going to lead to a crash like the one the industry had back in 1983. Then it took Japan and its gaming industry to save the medium we all love. While Nintendo has had issues with this in the past, their focus on continuing with cartridges and backward compatibility, along with re-releases of older games, might make them a lone saving grace of the big gaming platforms.
Lately, music has seen a huge resurgence in physical formats with Vinyl, then cassette, and now CD coming back to prominence. With artists making almost nothing from streaming and the rise of AI music, it’s leading to people wanting to make sure they have the music they love. With people making a movement as well in the movie space, as people become disenchanted by the increasing costs of video streaming services, I hope this leads to a definitive push in gaming. While some of the push in those mediums is connected to nostalgia and collecting, it allows people to wrestle with or be open to the conversation about fighting this tech future of customers just renting and leasing access to arts we love that we have to enjoy at their time they feel we should as long as they feel we can have it.
