Sony has confirmed that starting in January 2028, it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games. From that point on, every new PS5 release will exist only as a digital download.
Around the same time, Rockstar Games announced that the next Grand Theft Auto, one of the biggest releases in gaming history, will ship in stores as a box with a printed code inside instead of an actual disc. Sony is also winding down the digital stores for the PS3 and PS Vita.
Put those three things together and you get a clear picture of where gaming is headed, and it is not a good one.
The obvious argument for going digital is convenience. No trip to the store, no swapping discs, instant access to a huge library, and frequent sales.
Publishers like it even more, since they no longer pay to manufacture and ship anything, and they no longer have to compete with used game sales cutting into their profits. That is the real reason this shift is happening.
It is not about what is better for players. It is about what is more profitable for the people selling the games.
The problem is what gets lost along the way.
When you buy a disc, you own an object. You can sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep it on a shelf for twenty years. When you buy a digital game, you are not really buying anything. You are paying for permission to access it for as long as the company running the store decides to let you.
That permission can be taken away.
This has already happened more than once. Spec Ops: The Line disappeared from digital storefronts after a music license expired, and anyone who had not already bought it was simply out of luck.
The Silent Hill playable teaser, a short horror demo that became a cult phenomenon, was pulled from PlayStation’s servers during a falling out between Konami and its creator and has never come back.
There is no disc copy sitting in a used bin somewhere to save it. It is just gone, permanently, for anyone who did not download it in time.
Game preservation was already in bad shape before any of this. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation found that the vast majority of classic games released before 2010 were effectively impossible to obtain through legal means.
That cutoff year is not random. It is roughly when digital storefronts started becoming the norm.
Nintendo already closed the Wii U and 3DS shops a couple of years ago, and while people who already bought games can usually still re-download them for now, anything exclusive to those stores is unavailable to everyone else.
Try to legally buy a 3DS-exclusive game today and see how far you get.
Now scale that problem up. The Wii U and Vita never had huge digital-only libraries, so their closures stung but did not shake the industry. A PS5 with no physical option at all is a different story.
Every game released after January 2028 will exist entirely at the mercy of Sony‘s servers staying online. When those servers eventually shut down, and they will, an entire generation of games disappears with them, blockbusters included.
There have been some efforts to soften this. Xbox lets players carry digital libraries across hardware generations, and the PC storefront GOG runs a program dedicated to keeping older games running on modern systems.
Those efforts help, but they only work as long as the company behind them chooses to keep them running. None of it is a guarantee. It is goodwill, and goodwill can end whenever a company decides preservation is not worth the cost anymore.
Physical media is not perfect either. Discs scratch, they degrade, and you need the right hardware to use them. Plenty of modern discs are barely more than a license key anyway, since most big releases now require a massive day-one download just to be playable.
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But even an imperfect physical copy gives players and historians something digital never will: control that does not depend on a company’s server staying online or a license not expiring.
Losing that is not just inconvenient. It means that games people love today, including the biggest ones, could become completely inaccessible in a decade or two, not because anyone wants that to happen, but because nobody was required to stop it.
