Sony's Decision To Ditch Discs Was Practically Inevitable, Data Shows (arstechnica.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many gamers have been lamenting Sony's recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision. In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana's tracking data on physical game sales in the U.S. dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the U.S. in the last 12 months.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to "the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms," while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing "percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s" in that spending.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to "the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms," while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing "percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s" in that spending.
Translation (Score:1)
You will own nothing and like it.
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No problem Karl.
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For gaming, that ship sailed when most games started requiring server-side infrastructure. Even if you do own the physical disc, a lot of good it'll do you if the servers have been shut down.
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I would semi-seriously recommend "invest in a stacked tower of old Dell OptiPlex computers" but the eWaste industry appears to have been partially cooked by the pandemic lockdowns and now the used Ram/SSD price madness on new components spilling into the used markets.
A bit too much "no lowballz, I know what I got" on 4GB DDR4 sticks and ~128GB SSDs shucked from ex lease PCs.
Re: Translation (Score:2)
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you will own nothing, pay a subscription to get your purchases downloaded, can have it taken away at any moment, and like it.
Fixed it for you.
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Reality: (Score:2)
You never did own anything, you just thought you did, and breached the license terms because no one could stop you.
You've never owned a game. Not in the 90s, not now. But back then the tech wasn't available to control you or force you to obey the license terms you agreed to.
To be fair... (Score:3)
The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.
It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.
I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used and "wore out". It was always the optical drive failing. If you played only downloaded games, they'd run fine.
Re: To be fair... (Score:2)
PS2s didn't come with HDDs so devs couldn't rationally require one.
Most games after that install
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Games started installing to hard drives once consoles started including them.
PS4/XB1 started requiring all games to be installed. PS3/X360 had optional installs as not all 360s had hard drives, but the games ran better if you installed.
Re: Blame unfinished games (Score:2)
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I don't think they actually want to get rid of the used game market. It never existed on PCs, and they went
Re: Blame unfinished games (Score:2)
The Real Issue (Score:5, Insightful)
It wasn't inevitable, but it's true that the discs were just tokens at this point: full of outdated software that needed a multi-GB patch to get working, or just a stub containing some artwork and a license key. PC games haven't really shipped on discs in years, if not decades. Sure, you could buy the disc, but it would be useless once the "CD key" was bound to your account. At a certain point you just give up and buy the keys. The last PC game I bought on disc (DOOM in 2016) came with the discs in a nice Steelcase, but I didn't even use them, I just added the CD key to my Steam account and kept the discs as a display piece.
This isn't such a bad deal, but the difference here is Sony's user-hostile policies. We've seen multiple times that content that you allegedly purchased can just disappear from your library with only cursory warning because they failed to re-negotiate distribution rights. This should not be happening.
Take Steam as a counter-example. I own many titles that have been delisted, originally published by a company that went out of business, was purchased by someone else, re-published under a new listing... yet I still "own" the original title. It's still in my library. I can still download and play it, even if it's broken on Windows 11 and I need to start up a VM or spend hour applying mods to get it to work. I'm not privy to all the horse trading that goes on when they negotiate these contracts, but I have some trust in Valve that they won't screw over their users to save a few bucks.
I know I don't really own it--I never did--but I have my copy and a few implied rights that they won't take it away from me at a whim. That's all people ask, and nobody trusts Sony to deliver.
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False trust, is false. Now tell us about all those delisted games that didn't ever come back in the pseudo-magical way you described.
On Steam? NONE. Zero. Zip. Zilch.
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And, having everything (movies, games, music) online-only (so-called SaaS) is great if you have always-on internet (and you can access your collection of US titles when you visit grandma in Germany).
Not to mention, a bad actor could setup a computer to impersonate Sony's server, have a movie titled whatever you were going to watch that is mysteriously missing the playback controls and won't exit out of, and it turns out to be something illegal, and the cops are at your door.
How about your car that gets OTA
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Consumers have demonstrated a preference for downloads. It happened first on PCs, where there isn't a used market at all and no single vendor
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The licensing issues you're talking about are with movies, and happen on all digital stores that sell movies. Movie studios are difficult to work with on licensing.
When games are delisted on any of the consoles, you still have the ability to download them if you've purchased them.
Re: The Real Issue (Score:2)
Hmm... good points but an ethical company can have a change of owner, a change of management or just a change of mind and become evil.
I avoided $EVILBANK and opened an account with $NICEBANK , then a few years later they were taken over. Or compare at the hobbyist-friendly Apple II with the glued-together intrusive nightmare we have now.
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I do fear what happens when Gabe Newell kicks the bucket. There is a huge risk of Valve turning into a shit-show. There's a lot of value to be extracted from his company if it gets into the wrong hands.
Now that DVDs I bought in the early 2000s are decaying and becoming unreadable, I guess at some point you have to admit that nothing is forever.
Same with WoW. (Score:2)
I bought WoW retail on its first day. The game changed so much so its original discs' installer would be useless and waste of time due to all the changes and upgrades. Only old games, that didn't change much, would make sense.
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It wasn't inevitable, but it's true that the discs were just tokens at this point: full of outdated software that needed a multi-GB patch to get working, or just a stub containing some artwork and a license key. PC games haven't really shipped on discs in years, if not decades. Sure, you could buy the disc, but it would be useless once the "CD key" was bound to your account. At a certain point you just give up and buy the keys. The last PC game I bought on disc (DOOM in 2016) came with the discs in a nice Steelcase, but I didn't even use them, I just added the CD key to my Steam account and kept the discs as a display piece.
This isn't such a bad deal, but the difference here is Sony's user-hostile policies. We've seen multiple times that content that you allegedly purchased can just disappear from your library with only cursory warning because they failed to re-negotiate distribution rights. This should not be happening.
Take Steam as a counter-example. I own many titles that have been delisted, originally published by a company that went out of business, was purchased by someone else, re-published under a new listing... yet I still "own" the original title. It's still in my library. I can still download and play it, even if it's broken on Windows 11 and I need to start up a VM or spend hour applying mods to get it to work. I'm not privy to all the horse trading that goes on when they negotiate these contracts, but I have some trust in Valve that they won't screw over their users to save a few bucks.
I know I don't really own it--I never did--but I have my copy and a few implied rights that they won't take it away from me at a whim. That's all people ask, and nobody trusts Sony to deliver.
There's a couple of huge differences between PC and Playstation... the first and foremost that any console is a monopoly, everything you do on a Playstation, everything you're allowed to own is done via Sony and entirely under Sony's good graces. Sony says "No" and you're screwed. PC isn't a monopoly, even with Steam being the 362.87 KG gorilla in the room they are not the only game in town. Sure they're one of the best which is what keeps them the top dog but you've options for days (GOG may not be a 362.8
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Should have come sooner (Score:2)
I didn't buy a Playstation for years and year become of the atrocious load times. I hate wasting my time for games to load and to read from CD/DVD. These days I avoid HDs and SSDs because god have us NVMe...and when some of us have read speeds of 5000mb/s Sony is ditching optical.
It's like
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Discs have only been a distribution mechanism now for 2+ generations. You don't run the game off the disc it just installs it to the HD. (Then layers in a 12 GB patch anyways). Two sets of people benefit: those that want to resell the title and those that don't want the gigantic download. The no download crew is pretty much lost as you generally need "day 0" patch to make the game anything but a buggy mess, so this is 100% about resale.
Actually a huge money-maker, just not for them (Score:3)
Optical Limitations (Score:2)
Ignoring sales figures for a moment, I'm honestly perplexed why everyone is missing the glaringly obvious reason for the death of optical media
1) storage density.
2) storage bandwidth.
Nobody wants to wait 20+ minutes to load a single level in a game. Developers are making games larger and larger, well beyond the capacity of a BluRay disk. Optical density has not kept up with increasing storage demands. The technology simply isn't there today, and there is little incentive to continue to invest into higher de
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Technically speaking, they could just ship the game in USB cartridges, consoles have USB ports that absolutely obliterate the hell out of discs, are probably fast enough to actually run the games off em instead of mandatory disc installs.
But sony is dumb at marketing.
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Flash storage has gone up in cost due to AI mania, so at this point it probably would just make more sense to sell USB hardware dongles that are just license keys. Most games are also shipped with numerous bugs and missing features these days too, since it is just assumed they can push out an update later, so you probably don't want to be playing v1.0 anyway.
Plus, the real reason they want to kill physical media is because eliminating used game sales is also part of their goal.
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They would only need write-once flash.
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Hmm. I think rewritable loses data after some time. Maybe other "solid state" methods of storage? I guess one could push the limits of optical storage a bit more, but not as much as future (and some current) games will need. Or we just use larger media and design a BluRay with the size of an LP.
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They could, but that runs counter to what they want.
They want to kill resale and while they are at it, take control of whether you can play your game as purchased a few years ago, or make you have to buy a remaster, or just not be able to play them and play something new they can get revenue for instead.
They have sorted out that the vast vast majority of their user base will run games on whatever terms the console picks. Alienating the minority is worth it to assert that much control over the experiences o
Re: Optical Limitations (Score:2)
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If anything, it looks like the secondhand market is what kept physical media alive at all for consoles. That a market with no u
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That's gonna add an extra $10-$20 to the cost of the game though compared to a disc that's a few cents
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Games haven't run off disc for a while, they install to the drive. Even HDD loading speeds are intolerable in a lot of games, forget about optical.
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I'm honestly perplexed why everyone is missing the glaringly obvious reason for the death of optical media
1) storage density.
2) storage bandwidth.
Nobody wants to wait 20+ minutes to load a single level in a game. Developers are making games larger and larger, well beyond the capacity of a BluRay disk. Optical density has not kept up with increasing storage demands.
So, in MY perfect world, we'd be going back to cartridges, where the 'cartridge' is basically a 256GB NVMe drive, so the game cartridge could theoretically be patched on-media, load times would be far lower, and there wouldn't be nearly as much dependency on massive storage on the console itself.
The reason why it will never happen this way, is because NVMe drives, even at Sony-levels of purchase, would be a significant portion of the game itself. If Sony got 256GB drives at $30 a pop wholesale (about half o
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poor track record (Score:3)
People wouldn't miss their discs so much if Sony did a better job protecting access to digital libraries.
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While I'm not a "never say never" person, I haven't had the disappearing purchase problem as an Xbox owner that I hear about from Sony folks. I've been quite impressed with how well MS has kept my purchased catalog alive even after the game has been removed from sale for future folks.
its Sony, watch out (Score:3)
Sony could install a rootkit on your computer from a download just as easily as from a CD. Why would you trust Sony?
Fuck Sony, I don't need anything Sony touches.
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Get over it. That was big, a company Sony had just bought out, 25 years ago. The people responsible didn’t work for Sony stvthr time and anyway are since retired.
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I have other issues with Sony I won't get into. I won't be running their software or buying anything from them.
A few things to remember (Score:2)
Yes, at some point things become uneconomical for commercial blurays to be pressed, like it or not. I think the future of physical games is likely cartridges because you can buy generic parts that get used for other things as people will always need memory.
However, I often talk about how the internet creates a perverse relationship between companies and users. If a company needs to pay money to host servers, they are incentivized to find offsets for the costs. There is a component of how companies train
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Steam became an online store in 2005, the same year Microsoft released the Xbox 360 with an online store. Playstation's was i
it's 2026. who buys software on cd's? (Score:1)
It's not 1999 and no normal computers ship with integrated CD-ROM drives anymore. So why is it a big deal for the Playstation user base? Most games require gigabytes of DLC anyways. And having a CD doesn't mean that they won't simply shut down the server that's hosting your game.
Kill the used game market (Score:2)
Make everyone buy new. All other “reasons” and “studies” are ostensible.
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In other words, were it not for the used game market, this would have happened on consoles already. A market that could have been killed with nothing more than license keys doesn't require anything more drastic.
When was the last time a game fit on a DVD ? (Score:2)
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It's kind of a moot point anyway. (Score:2)
When was the last time you bought a game on disc, took it home, put it in, and were able to immediately start to play it? It's been so long for me, I honestly can't remember. But I would guess not since Vice City or FF12.
I've bought the occasional PS game on an impulse at B&M stores over more recent years. And you know what? I've not been able to just load up and play ANY of them. I put in the disc, and it starts a 20 minute process of installing itself to the hard drive first. THAT part, I don't