It appears Sony is telling upwards of 20 percent of their users to kick rocks and find a new home.
In what appears to be expected, but not at all accepted, Sony announced that numbers of digital game orders have shifted to just over 80 percent of their total game sales. It’s a rather large swing from 2019 where digital game sales made up less than 30 percent. But this could be due to many factors including finding physical games becoming scarce, new consoles not coming with a disc drive, and several smaller indie inspired games not having the ability to get games on physical media dominating sales charts.
But that didn’t stop the follow up announcement. No, we aren’t talking about Sony announcing the closure of the PS3 and Vita stores, which means if you didn’t have discs and carts for those, they both just potentially became bricks. And no we aren’t talking about Sony forcefully removing fully purchased movies from accounts because they lost a licensing deal with Studio Canal. We aren’t even talking about the several digital storefronts that Sony has shut down over the years including 3 gaming storefronts, video storefronts, and music storefronts which have all lost access to their purchased licenses, or watched them move to a new platform.
No, we are talking about that regardless of all these announcements, Sony took the opportunity that in 2028 they won’t be supporting physical media at all. That expensive disc drive you just bought for your already expensive PS5 Pro? Useless. Spent a premium buying the disc version of a PS5? Oh well.
In fact this somewhat solidifies the rumor of a PS6 launching around the year 2028 as well. Yes we know, PS5 barely got going, and Sony hardly released any of their own games for it, but the next generation has been warming up already. Sony has a pre-production kit which is reaching 1k dollars in cost. That means next generation consoles likely won’t have any meaningful benefits to them as they’ll be costly, have online multiplayer paywalls, and won’t even let you buy used games anymore.
Sony promises that games released up to 2028 will continue to have physical media, but after this date retailers will have some form of digital codes. Rather that will be plastic waste of cases with codes, or simple cardboard with scratch codes, is yet to be seen. How this will impact major third parties like Limited Run, GameFly, GameStop, and others is yet to be felt as well. All their announcement states is that they only care about the 80 percent of gamers that buy exclusively from their own storefront, with no further details.
My perspective
I’m a physical game collector, and always will be. The absolute only reason I played a good majority of games this generation is because I found them cheaply on physical, or I rented them from GameFly and fell in love with them. I’ve not “bought” a single AAA digital game at full price because a 70 dollar “rental” isn’t worth it. Heck I’ve ignored collectors editions of games they released purely because no disc was included in the box.
We paid a premium to have this luxury, and then Sony is saying they don’t care about us, it’s a slap in the face. Why would I continue to support the platform? Why would I continue to use PlayStation which has a history of removing items from a library, vs a platform like Steam?
And everyone celebrating like it’s a good thing doesn’t see the power they are pushing towards greedy publishers. We have 80 dollar + games, PS Plus price increases, and lack of discount sales in our future. Sony is already toying with the idea of dynamic pricing on their store…It’s not a bright future, and taking away options rather you utilized them or not is never a good thing. Do we see prices going down because of this decision? No. You’re still paying the same high prices, with less options, yay us!
