Sony is killing PlayStation discs, and the sales data shows why nobody can stop it

Gaming 4 min 20 sources

New Circana numbers reveal how few physical games still sell, as Xbox posts a surprise sales jump amid deep layoffs and a worsening memory crisis pushes hardware prices up.

Key takeaways

Sony is ending PlayStation disc production in 2028, and new data shows why: only seven games sold over 100,000 physical copies in the US all year.
Killing the disc threatens the $7.2 billion second-hand games market, which runs entirely on physical copies changing hands.
Xbox posted an 86% console sales jump even as Microsoft cuts 3,200 jobs, while a worsening memory shortage keeps pushing hardware prices up.

The disc is already dead - the data just made it official

Sony shocked players on July 1 when it confirmed it will stop making physical discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028 [1]. New games will sell only as downloads, on the PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital form [1]. The backlash was loud - a “no disc, no buy” campaign spread fast [2].

This week the numbers arrived, and they show why the backlash faces long odds. Only two PlayStation games sold more than 10,000 physical units in the US in the week ending July 11 [2]. Only seven have sold more than 100,000 physical copies all year [2]. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella laid out years of decline that made Sony’s move, in one writer’s words, practically inevitable [3]. Players have been voting with their wallets for a decade [3].

The casualty is a market most people never think about. Analysts value the global second-hand games market at $7.2 billion, projected to reach $13.8 billion by 2034 [4]. Selling or trading in a finished game to fund the next one is a tradition as old as the medium [4]. No disc means no resale - the used market runs on physical copies changing hands [5]. Kill the disc and you quietly delete a $7 billion economy that ran alongside the official one.

Xbox sells more consoles, and cuts more staff, at the same time

Microsoft’s Xbox posted a strange pair of facts. Console sales jumped 86% in June, and Xbox was the only platform to grow year-on-year [6][7]. Some of that is a soft comparison against last June’s Switch 2 launch, and some is buyers rushing ahead of another price hike due in August [6].

The wider picture is grim. US industry spending across hardware, software and add-ons fell 21% in June, from $5.7 billion to $4.5 billion [7]. Subscriptions were the only segment to grow; everything else shrank [6].

That subscription line sits under the layoffs. Xbox is cutting 3,200 jobs and four studios [8]. A former Forza Horizon director traced the cuts straight to Game Pass - the all-you-can-play service never hit the subscriber numbers needed to justify Microsoft’s enormous spending on games [9]. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has cut 1,600 staff with another 1,600 to go this year, and called the business “not healthy” [9]. The company’s answer this week: Backward Compatibility on PC, bringing old Xbox games to Windows and handhelds for the first time [8].

The memory crisis is eating hardware prices

The other force squeezing the industry is physical, not financial. Valve says the shortage of memory chips is “still getting worse” [10]. The AI industry’s hunger for data-center memory has drained supply, pushing the Steam Machine to a minimum of $1,049 (about GBP 880) - well above what Valve wanted to charge [11]. Component prices are higher now than when the machine shipped, and what reaches store shelves lags bulk supply by three to six months, so the pain is not over [10][11].

The Steam Deck shows what higher prices do to demand. Estimates suggest sales have fallen by roughly 80% since Valve’s price increase [12]. When a device jumps past a price buyers had in mind, most simply walk.

Studios keep closing, and the contract workers go first

The layoff wave that began in 2022 has not stopped. Rough trackers count some 14,000 games jobs lost in 2024 and around 4,600 already in 2026, and those miss the quieter cuts companies never disclose [13]. Contract workers - often the first hired and last counted - are being cut alongside full staff [13].

Two closures landed this week. A French court ordered Edge of Eternity developer Midgar Studio to liquidate after it could not find a buyer [14]. Disco Elysium studio ZA/UM laid off 32 people across every department after its new game, Zero Parades, underperformed [15]. Hasbro took a $56 million write-down after scrapping several games, saying it will back only projects with “franchise potential” [16]. One brighter note: Mighty Doom maker Alpha Dog Games won its name back and returned to independence, two years after Microsoft shut it [17].

The money keeps flowing at the top

While studios close, the biggest deal in the industry’s history cleared a hurdle. The EU Commission approved the $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, ruling it “would not raise” competition concerns [18]. The contrast is stark: record capital buying the industry’s giants, while its smallest teams run out of cash.

The quiet death of the cheap re-release

One under-covered shift ties the week together. Monster Hunter Wilds will get a permanent price cut this October, 18 months after launching at $70 [19]. That used to be normal - almost every game eventually became a cheaper “budget” re-release [19]. Now price drops come only through occasional storefront sales, and the budget label has all but vanished [19]. Meanwhile the hits keep winning: the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake has sold more than twice as much as any other current-generation remake [20]. As the shelf disappears, how games reach us - and stay reachable - is being rewritten.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

Why the games almost nobody buys now outweigh the hits

When the cost of stocking a title falls to nothing, the many small sellers stop being not-worth-carrying, and together they can outweigh every blockbuster.

The number under the argument

Everyone is arguing about the wrong thing. Sony killed the disc, players are furious, the used market is at risk, and all of it is real. But the sales figures that landed this week point somewhere quieter and stranger.

Only seven PlayStation games sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US all year. In one recent week, only two games sold more than 10,000 discs. That is not a market in gentle decline. That is a market where, at retail, almost nothing sells except a tiny handful of giants.

Physical shelves were always a hits-only world. The interesting question is not why the disc died. It is why the store that replaced it works on the opposite rule.

The shelf was deciding for you

A physical shelf holds a few hundred boxes. Each slot costs money: the space, the stock sitting there, the staff. So a store only carries what sells fast enough to earn its slot. The rest gets pulled to make room.

That means the shelf, not the customer, decided which games survived. A game that would have sold forty copies a month never got the chance. It did not fail because nobody wanted it. It failed because it was not worth the space. Multiply that across every store, and the whole industry looked like a place where only blockbusters exist, because only blockbusters could pay rent on a shelf.

Take away the shelf, and the sum flips

Now picture the same catalogue with no shelf. A digital storefront has unlimited slots, and listing one more title costs almost nothing. Suddenly the game that sells forty copies a month is worth carrying, because carrying it costs almost nothing.

Here is the part that surprises people. There are very few hits and a very large number of small sellers. Each small seller moves a little. But there are thousands of them. Add them up, and the crowd of games almost nobody buys can earn more than the few games everybody does. The tail outweighs the head.

This is a pattern, not a games fact. It is why a website beat the bookshop, why a streaming service beat the rental store, why a music app beat the record shop. Drop the cost of stocking a thing to near zero, and “stock only the bestsellers” stops being smart. The niche stops being a rounding error and becomes the main event.

Why Sony can walk away without blinking

Seen this way, the disc decision is not a gamble. The disc world was a hits world with a resale market recycling the same few big titles. It was a small, crowded shelf.

The digital store is not just a tidier version of that. It is a bigger business, because it sells the whole catalogue and never runs out of print. The obscure 2015 release. The tiny studio’s oddity. The back catalogue a shop would have dumped in a bargain bin. All of it stays for sale, at full margin, forever. Sony is not abandoning a market. It is trading a shelf for a store with no walls, and the store with no walls holds far more.

The wall was doing two jobs

The shelf’s limit looked like a law of nature. Of course a shop cannot stock everything. But it was never a law. It was a constraint, and constraints quietly protect things.

The used market, worth over seven billion dollars, lived entirely in the gap that physical copies created. You could sell a game because you held a thing. You could lend it, trade it, buy it cheap secondhand. All of that was a side effect of the shelf. Remove the shelf, and the endless catalogue arrives, but the right to resell what you bought leaves with it. The store that lists everything forever is also the store that decides what stays listed, what gets pulled, and whether you may pass your copy on. The answer to the last one is now no.

The arrangement serves the company and still helps you. It gives you more games, cheaper, than any shelf ever could. It also takes back something you used to own. Both are true at once.

You built this, one download at a time

It is tempting to read all this as something done to players by a company. It is closer to the truth to say players did it together, without meaning to.

Every time you chose the download over the disc because it was easier, you cast a small vote. Enough of those votes built the store with no shelf. The same choice that handed you the endless catalogue is the choice that made resale impossible, because a download is not a thing you can hand to anyone else. The person who gains the bottomless library and the person who loses the right to sell a finished game are not two groups. They are the same person, and that person is you.

That is the whole worth seeing. The shelf you never noticed was doing two jobs at once, holding the catalogue small and keeping your copy yours. Losing it gained you one and cost you the other. And no single download ever felt like either.

03 · Lab · your turn

Stock the store

Rehearse how near-zero shelf cost flips the smart move from hits-only to the whole catalogue, and lets the niche tail out-earn the hits.

04 · Hope · carry this

The shelf that once decided which games were allowed to exist is gone, and with it the quiet fear that the odd little game you love will vanish for good. In a store without walls, even the games almost nobody plays keep their place.