Play Has Limits: What The End of Physical Media Really Means
Seandood
Deep down, most of us knew that game companies would eventually double down on their attempts to do away with physical media. Still, seeing such an announcement like the one PlayStation made and knowing what awaits us doesn't make it any easier.
It feels like we've heard the same pro-digital, anti-physical pitches from major video game companies since the early 2010s. PlayStation's boldest announcement on the topic came early Wednesday, when it announced that it plans to completely halt the release of physical video games by 2028. In doing so, the company cites the all-too-famous "response in shifting trends" scapegoat that seeks to appease any would-be business daddy suitors who continue to drive us all closer to an AI-riddled, slop-infested digital rights apocalypse.
The short-short version given to readers on PlayStation's official blog? We all wanted this. Did we, though?
It is true that more recent Sony sales records point toward an abundance of digital sales rather than physical, though the numbers don't differentiate between AAA games, indie titles, or whether something just merely didn't have the option of a physical release to begin with. There are circumstances that either warrant digital-only releases entirely or in which a developer simply cannot afford to publish physical copies like a larger studio can (hence how options such as Fangamer, Limited Run, and Lost In Cult came to be).
Regardless of the circumstances, shuffling through the thousands of comments on the PlayStation announcement blog returns clarity to reality: people still largely hate this move. Meanwhile, scrolling through the otherwise bot-infested trenches of social media paints a similar picture, with droves of folks sharing everything from justifiably critical memes about the ill-conceived move to posting photos of their own collections, possibly in hopes of giving Sony executives some sort of consumer rights jumpscare.
So where we go from here is honestly anyone's guess. It doesn't look great, though, as we continue to have our consumer rights stripped away via the digital marketplace hellscape (the "own nothing, be happy" mantra, as one economist coined in recent years). Between the prices of retro games climbing since the pandemic years and companies sticking with subscriber-based model preferences, actually holding onto what we've got has never felt so good.
