I’m sure Sony has made the calculation and found they come out ahead by removing the overhead of manufacturing discs and drives, eliminating borrowing/used game sales (of which they get no cut), and preparing people for a completely disc-less PS6. Sucks for users’ ability to play games in the future, but companies don’t tend to care about that and in fact see that as a positive since they have more control over what you have access to.
Bingo. Sony didn’t make the decision to removes disks in a vacuum. They know what they’re doing, and they’re projecting it’ll make them a fuckton of money.
I’m hoping it bites them in the ass and the high seas become more known, but I’m worried that won’t be the case.
Most people play once and sell the game on. That’s a lot of lost sales for Sony’s first party story driven games. They know exactly what they’re doing. If people don’t boycott Sony then it’ll only get worse.
As gaming software sales have dropped significantly over the lifespans of the PS4/PS5 vs the overall sales of the PS3, it becomes apparent that digital game sales are winning in this day and age.
In 2019 the physical software sales for PlayStation were 6% of their revenue. That number has decreased year over year and what they are trying to do is make up the difference by shunting people to subscription services like PS+. We knew this already. This data has been spread out over several articles especially over the last 2 days.
if you need real data check retail: “With $11.6 billion generated in 2008 and $1.5 billion in 2025 that means new physical video game sales have fallen 87 percent in the last 17 years”
And yet physical discs make up over 60% of game sales.
Just because they’ve enshitified new more profitable revenue streams outside of game sales doesn’t mean they’re not shitty for dumping the core competency that brought them customers in the first place. If physical game sales were less than 3% of their profit then they aren’t a game company and are already lost.
If all this data is leading somewhere it’s towards more live service microtransaction slop anyway. If the 60%+ physical of sales that all of their massively popular single player games are that small a percentage of their profit and “digital sales and add on content” is that large or means that are mostly a microtransaction company already.
You seem to be under the impression that I am defending Sony or other game sales distributors who are getting rid of physical media. That is not what is happening here.
I agree it’s shitty. I am pointing out the trend, not trying to mount a defense for a corp.
Video game companies still sell millions of physical copies of games every year, but that’s not where they make the bulk of their money. As Sony’s latest corporate report shows, physical game sales for PlayStation 5 and PS4 are practically a rounding error on a rounding error, and the number just keeps going down. The total percentage of revenue from physical software sales is now half of what it was before the PS5 launched.
Edit: I would also like a source for the 60% of games being physical because that’s not what I found when I looked it up and if it’s based on 2023’s data it’s not accurate to today’s market.
https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/
Thanks for sharing the link, it’s good to see some more recent data. The 3% is tough to swallow as someone who likes to buy games day 1 and sell them later. From Sony’s perspective, it’s understandable they want to kill this, and focus on the higher margin digital segment. Still, I’m not going to applaud a giant corporation when they do something that benefits them but not the customers. At the end, digital buyers will also see the effect of this change, as Sony can keep prices higher with no competititon from physical new & used retail.
The crazy thing is, all gaming sales are dropping and I think they’re really trying to keep profits up with sales declining by forcing people like you and I who buy physical media to go digital. Forcing people to go digital means they can eliminate manufacturing of physical media, but it also means they can eliminate the resale market and sale market when physical stores want to liquidate old stock to receive new stock. That and the subscription model are a win for them to the detriment of consumers.
Yes, the used market is huge, and they are not profiting from it.
The whole this is just so sad. And I cannot even begin to think about the impact on the retailers. I trade a lot with a few small stores, without discs they’ll surely have to close, and people will lose their jobs.
Exactly! And maintaining the plant to make physical discs costs money. Sony can reduce costs by forcing everyone to digital copies. Customers will ultimately go along with it, because they understand their personal preferences are not worth as much as an extra $0.50 per game in profit.
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
No no no.
You don’t get how bad this is.
Fucking over people for a smidgen more margin would be bad,… but this… this is a power play, a naked power play.
It isn’t even about money, because when you do what they just did… the definition of money, property, what a ‘sale’ is… that all changes.
They’re changing the rules that the whole game is played by, not just acting cynically within those rules.
Its a brutal and naked demonstration that a corporation can just decide what property rights are, how they work for, what, like, around a billion people?
This is a what the prologue or prequel to your favorite cyberpunk story looks like.
This is how you set a precedent for digital property rights… in a primarily digitized economic system.
They’re just straight up telling you they own you, and every appliance or car or whatever mfg’er will point at Sony as the precedent.
Sony lost a shit ton of money with their live service games projects. Sony execs probably told the PlayStation division to find a way to reduce cost and control the damage or heads will roll.
Some beancounter at Sony realized that they could increase margins by a tiny amount if they removed physical disks. I bet they haven’t factored in the reputation loss from doing so and in the end it will come out that the margin gain will be overshadowed by the loss of sales.
The gamble is whether people jump ship, and given that the next Xbox won’t have a disc drive, it’s probably a safe bet for Sony overall.
Ceasing disc production eliminates the substantial second-hand market, and resultantly also massively reduces the pressure to reduce prices on older games to compete with that market, especially for AAA titles.
The loss of customers will probably be negligible compared to the amount of money they’ll rake in. It’s totally contemptuous in terms of the consumer, but it makes sense for them economically – and they would have done it years ago if they thought they could get away with it.
I just think this’ll be a massive boon for Nintendo, if they can resist shitty decisions themselves. The Switch 2 was a bust –
My reasoning
7.9" LCD, 279ppi 1080p when the standard is OLED, 500+ppi and 1440p+, and the size, while improving, is too close to a smartphone. Paired with a basic size battery and it has a disappointing battery life.
– but Nintendo have the potential to be a hero in the next few years. As for Xbox, they have never been popular enough to overtake Sony, as well as also making shit decisions.
Nintendo isn’t a competitor with Xbox and PlayStation. It’s effectively a separate market with only one participant.
It’s a subscription machine now. You have to pay money for it to function, and 98% of games are unplayable without the subscription. They’re getting it to 100%. The idea that you could buy a machine, put a game in, play that game WITHOUT an internet connection and subscription, that’s dead.
Give me the machine for free if you want it to be like Netflix. I’m not paying for an expensive computer to pay for a subscription. Fuck that.
You will pay for an expensive computer to pay for a subscription. And also there will be ads. And also your data will be sold off to the highest bidder. The data that you will be providing and verifying, because we need to protect the kids or something.
Highest bidder lol, no.
To ALL the bidders
I’m likely going to sell my PS5. I don’t want to support Sony at all. Hoping to get what I paid for it now that hardware prices are through the roof. It’ll be sad to part with the Atomic Purple Dark Plates, but my PS5 collects dust.
Hoping to get what I paid for it now that hardware prices are through the roof.
I’ve got a number of friends that have even made a profit off of their used systems. Not because it was their first choice to do so, but because that’s what the market rate is now.
I may just have to part with it then. I’m guessing it’ll sell fast ahead of GTA6. It’s weird but it is probably my least favorite console I’ve ever owned. The only meaningful exclusive I’ve played was Astro Bot. As a huge platformer kid, that brought me back to my PS1 days.
I love pointing out that in the US, a base ps5 is now what you risked paying a scalper when they were new, except now it’s not a scalper listing it on Walmart, it’s just straight up Walmart charging it.
My ps5 purchase helped a guy pay his rent after he made a dumb fucking decision in 2022, people buying now pads Walmart pockets.
I started buying old consoles and games a few years ago. Some for my kids, some for me, some to see what would appreciate. I set up a little desktop that has every emulator I could get my hands on. Most new games don’t appeal to me and there are so many old ones that I never played that were great.
I am set and PS/Xbox will never see another dime from me. Nintendo… Maybe.
Same boat…theres soooo much to enjoy from pre entshittification era, that I really have no fomo. And the friends and such ive made from console and game selling/trading are what really make it fun
This data is of course a few years old, trends have probably shifted more towards digital during Covid. But Playstation is still quoting misleading digital sales %, as a lot of small titles and DLCs are only sold digitally, skewing the numbers.
Physical discs disappearing will hurt all players, even digital-only buyers, as Sony will have no competition from the physical market, and can set prices as high as they think they can get away with.
The funny thing too is I, and I’m sure many others, tend to gravitate to smaller studios now as the big ones are clusterfucked. Some of them don’t have the means to print physical copoes but got insanely popular so they only sell digitally.
I do have a strong suspicion that the end of the road of this type of move is going to end with an anti-trust case. Like, I don’t see any way to avoid that.
You can’t have a platform dictate everything about how it sells merchant wise without having an antitrust involved.
It may not be the US doing it, but I do think that some country is going to antitrust them.
My big problem besides the price monopoly is the lack of true ownership for digital media. It’s just expensive licensing that can be taken away or altered at any moment. If Sony gets his way, we are looking at a very dark future for gaming
You can’t have a platform dictate everything about how it sells merchant wise without having an antitrust involved.
Didn’t the EU, who have some of the strictest rules in that regard, rule that walled garden ecosystems are allowed in their case against Apple?
they made the statement with apple but then decided the exact opposite with google. I think Sony will run into similar issues as google, but we will see
With Google, wasn’t the issue that they were on other devices, or were paying others to use their defaults or something? To be clear, I’m working from memory here, and am too tired to read a bunch of legal stuff to confirm one way or the other.
part of it was yes
From Mat PIscatella of Circana (tracking US sales data, Piscatella specializes in video games) on Bluesky:
Through May 2026, over 25% of PS5 hardware units sold in the US life-to-date are digital systems.
The life-to-date US attach rate of the add-on Disc Drive to those digital systems is over 5%.
Old data points keep getting thrown around, unfortunately.
Is what it is. Both the pro disc and pro digital camps on this are using whatever numbers best fit the arguments, as one would expect.
Can you take the financial reporting 85%ish digital split as the true split for games with both physical and digital editions? No.
But are the splits better reflected from 5 year old numbers obtained from a leak? Also, no.
Anyways, the numbers aren’t even the point at the moment, are they.
I almost always buy physical first party games, regardless of platform. Having Zelda, God of War, Forza etc. on the shelf is just part of the identity and DNA of the system. I love each platform not because of the hardware, but the games behind the company. If it’s multiplatform/multiplayer focused, I tend to go digital/PC. Give me physical if your going to be a walled garden ecosystem for your platform!
On the retro consoles that I play, I can fit the entire library onto an SD card and put it in a flash cart or ODE. And yet I still buy physical games and put them on my shelf.
People want to have a physical game collection. It’s tactile and it helps with choosing what to play when you can see all the boxes. It also feels more permanent, and for a lot of media types, it is more permanent than the NAND flash in SD cards.
I like to own it, but I like the convenience of digital. I hate the restrictions of corporate digital titles. The bullshit that happened with Nintendo’s virtual cards really pissed me off. I have 3 Nintendo switches and when I get off the grid, digital cards are a bane. “Ok which one has the virtual game, which one has the physical game”? Pain in my ass.
But digital the pirates way is king. Having all my old Roms on flash is so easy. No bullshit.
Yeah I gave up on Nintendo when they started the virtual card BS. Got myself a second Switch, mod chipped it, and stuck a 512GB microSD card in it. Now I have all the games I’ve purchased (and some I haven’t) ready to go.
I got a steam deck and stopped buying switch games. When some new releases came out that I kinda wanted, I gave switch emulation a try. What a surprise how well it worked lol. Haven’t touched my switch since.
The only time I wanted a digital copy of a ps5 game was when I had a ps5 at home and one at work and got tried of forgetting a disc at one place or another.
This is also 3+ years old. 2023 isn’t 2026.
Are Playstation gamers seriously going through what PC gamers went through 20 years ago?
