Sony's plan to kill the game disc is a door that only opens one way

The biggest story in the games business this week is a small object disappearing: the disc. Sony has confirmed it will stop producing physical PlayStation game discs starting in January 2028 [10][11]. On Tuesday, two Mexican lawmakers — Federal Representative Iraís Reyes and Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio — said they will file an antitrust complaint with Mexico’s National Antitrust Commission, asking regulators to investigate the move [11]. Their argument is blunt: going fully digital could drive up prices, cut competition, and destroy the market’s existing infrastructure — a “relative monopolistic practice” under Mexican competition law [11].

Why a disc is more than a disc

When you buy a disc, you own an object. You can resell it, lend it, trade it in, or shelve it for twenty years. When you buy a digital game, you own a licence — permission to play, granted by the store, revocable by the store, tied to an account you don’t control. There’s no resale, no lending, no secondary market.

That last part is the business heart of it. A used-game market competes with the publisher: every second-hand copy sold is a new copy not bought. Killing discs kills that competition. This isn’t the first attempt — GameSpot points out Sony and others tried to choke used games over a decade ago, most infamously with the DRM schemes around the last console launches that sparked a brief consumer revolt before fading [10]. The difference now is there’s no disc to revolt over. The UK’s main games-retail trade group called Sony’s decision “the triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice,” noting many players still buy physical even now [60].

The door only swings one way

Here’s the mechanism worth carrying: retiring discs is cheap to announce and nearly impossible to reverse. Once the pressing plants wind down, the retail shelf space vanishes, and the next console ships without a disc drive, each piece removed makes the next removal easier — and a return harder. There’s no “undo” button in 2030 if players hate it, because the whole supply chain that made discs possible will be gone.

You can see the industry already walking through. Xbox is reportedly teasing a “disc-to-digital” service — a bridge that lets players convert physical libraries into digital ones as its next-gen console (codenamed Project Helix) approaches [73]. The Verge notes Sony’s own hardware future looks increasingly like a handheld rather than a traditional box [24]. Industry veterans, including former Sega and Microsoft executive Peter Moore, warned this week that consoles must change to survive, and that the industry should fear a “thousand-dollar console” as hardware costs climb [54]. One developer even argued a delayed next console generation is “better for us,” given how much prices are already rising [42].

None of this is villainy. All-digital is genuinely cheaper to distribute, instant to access, and impossible to lose down the back of a sofa. An arrangement can serve the platform holder — capturing more of every sale, ending the used-game competition — and still hand real convenience to players. Both things are true. But convenience is the thing you notice, and ownership is the thing you only miss once it’s gone.

The last frontier: your attention

While one revenue stream (resale competition) gets closed, another gets opened. EA this week pushed its new in-game advertising platform, with a VP of advertising calling it a “huge opportunity” and urging studios to design ad space into games from the start of production [78]. The logic is straightforward: Google runs on ads, so why not games? Virtual billboards are one of the few surfaces in a game not yet sold.

Players are pushing back where they can. EA’s College Football 27 will remove its microtransactions after a backlash, though EA insists they were only added to “give players more choice” [39]. Ubisoft, fresh off a rare disclosure that Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced sold two million copies in a day, told microtransaction critics they “control the DLC they buy” [77]. The pattern across all of it: as one way to charge for a game reaches its ceiling, studios reach for the next.

The under-covered story: AI clones arrive early

At the industry’s small end, a quieter shift. Developers are reporting that people now use AI coding tools to clone indie games — sometimes within days of a concept being shown, sometimes before the original even ships [12]. One developer, Freya Holmér, posted a 50-second clip of a novel Tetris variant where the board rotates as blocks fall; within days, AI-generated clones appeared, including in app stores [12]. “You get this anxiety anytime you post anything,” one affected developer said [12].

The mechanism is old — cloning has always shadowed game design — but the cost of copying just collapsed. When imitation was slow and skilled, sharing an idea early was safe. Now the first mover pays all the discovery cost and the copier pays almost none, which quietly punishes the people willing to show their work in public. It sits alongside a broader contraction: Azra Games, founded by a former EA and BioWare executive, cut staff this week two years after raising $42 million and before its debut game even launched [37], while Ubisoft formally pivoted to a “selective” release model to reduce its reliance on any single game landing [5].