Sony Is Ending PlayStation Discs, and GTA VI Has None

Sony put a post up on the PlayStation Blog on the 1st of July saying that physical disc production ends in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles, and I read the thing twice, mostly because on the first pass I couldn’t work out whether it applied to discs I already own. It doesn’t, and Sony is reasonably clear about that once you get to the relevant paragraph, because games released before January 2028, and the ones already scheduled for a disc release before then, carry on exactly as they are. So the shelf behind me is fine, which was the only question I actually had going in, and which stopped feeling like much of an answer about four minutes later when I started thinking about the decade after the cutoff rather than the year before it.

The reasoning Sony gives is that consumer preference for digital “significantly outpaces physical discs” and that the shift is a natural direction for the business to move in, and I don’t really doubt either of those as descriptions of the sales figures, because they’re almost certainly accurate. The bit that doesn’t follow is the jump from one to the other, since “most people buy digitally” is a solid argument for making digital the default and a much weaker one for making digital the only option that exists, and the sales figures on their own can’t tell you which of those two things you should do.

What’s actually in the box

Rockstar had got here before Sony did, which I hadn’t clocked until I went looking. GTA VI is shipping with what’s being advertised as a physical edition, available from the 12th of November so people can preload before the 19th, except that the physical edition is a case with a download code in it and no disc anywhere in the process. There were a few days in June when a Rockstar support email seemed to suggest a disc might follow later on, which got clarified fairly quickly, and as far as anyone has been able to establish there are no plans to press GTA VI discs at launch or at any point after it. I’d been assuming the disc-less thing was a Sony policy that publishers would eventually get dragged into, when in fact the biggest release of this console generation had already opted into it on its own, months before the policy existed.

Retail after January 2028 works the same way. Shops still stock a box, the box still has a case and artwork and a code, and the only component missing is the one that made it a physical copy in any sense that mattered.

Going and looking at the shelf

I went and counted what was on the shelf after that, which I accept is a slightly pathetic response to a corporate blog post, and the number that stuck was how many of them I’d bought second-hand or been handed by somebody. Roughly a third. Two of them are games I only played because a mate got bored of them and passed them over, and one is a game I part-exchanged twice, sold on, regretted, and bought again for less than the original price, which is definately a stupid sequence of events and was only possible because the game was an object.

That’s the thing going away, and it goes away in both directions at once. You can’t lend a code, and you can’t sell a code on, and you can’t put a code towards the next £70 release the way people have been doing since the PS1. The games journalist Vikki Blake called it a “body blow to consumer rights” and made the point I keep coming back to, that this lands hardest on people with lower disposable incomes who rely on part-exchanging or borrowing to keep up with AAA pricing at all, which is a group that has quietly been subsidised by the second-hand market for about twenty five years. She also dug out Sony’s own PS4-era advert, the one where two blokes demonstrate game sharing by handing each other a disc, which was made specifically to take the mickey out of Xbox for restricting exactly that.

Christopher Dring at The Game Business was less surprised by the direction than by the timing, given how dominant digital already is, and he’s right that there’s a version of this announcement that’s just Sony reading its own numbers. His actual objection is a volume one, that millions and millions of PlayStation games are still sold as physical goods every year and this is genuinely bad news for the shops selling them. An independent retailer in Delaware, Lootbox Gaming, went a good deal further and refused to stock the disc-less GTA VI edition at all, describing it as an attack on anyone who cares about the right to own the things they buy, and a shop turning down a guaranteed pre-order queue on principle is not a decision anyone makes lightly.

The StudioCanal thing

I went to the PlayStation Store’s video content page while I was writing this, because I wanted to check whether Sony’s terms draw any distinction at all between buying something and renting it, and the page I landed on wasn’t the one I was looking for. On the 1st of September 2026, Sony is removing 551 StudioCanal films and TV titles from the libraries of people who bought them, because the licensing agreement with StudioCanal has expired. Terminator 2, Total Recall, Mulholland Drive, Bridget Jones. No refunds and no compensation have been mentioned anywhere I could find.

The removal covers the UK and Europe, while American accounts keep their copies, and that asymmetry is the part I found more revealing than the removal itself, because it means nothing is disappearing for any technical reason at all and the whole thing comes down to which paperwork happens to cover which region.

So I went looking for whether this had happened before, and it had, with the same distributor. On the 31st of August 2022, Sony removed purchased StudioCanal titles from PlayStation accounts in Germany and Austria, 314 of them in Germany and 137 in Austria, including John Wick and Apocalypse Now, again with no refunds. That one got a couple of days of coverage and then went quiet, and I hadn’t heard about it until this week, which is roughly what you’d expect for something that only affected two countries and a category of purchase most people had already forgotten the PlayStation Store offered.

Sony stopped selling films and TV on the store years ago and what’s left is a leftover library nobody is maintaining, so none of this is about games in any direct sense. It is the same company though, on the same storefront, with the same word “purchase” doing the same work in the same terms of service, and there isn’t anything in the disc announcement that explains why a game licence would be handled any differently to a film licence on the day whatever agreement underpins it lapses.

What I couldn’t find out

I spent a while trying to establish whether Sony has ever restored a delisted purchase to somebody’s library after the fact, in any region, for any reason, and I could not find a single documented case either way. Not one where they did, and not one where they were asked and refused. It’s possible it’s happened and nobody wrote it up, and it’s possible nobody has ever pushed hard enough for there to be anything to write up.

The related question, whether Sony has any plan to allow transfer of digital ownership the way you can currently hand somebody a disc, has been put to them directly by several people and they haven’t commented on it. That’s not the same as a no, and I’m not going to pretend it is, but it’s been years now.

The bit everyone’s worried about, which isn’t this

There’s a seperate fear doing the rounds this week that the PS6 will drop the disc drive entirely and require a permanent connection, and it’s worth keeping apart from what Sony has actually announced. Nothing in the January 2028 policy requires you to be online to play something you’ve already downloaded, and a disc-less licence is still an installable thing that works offline once it’s activated. The always-online scenario would be considerably worse, because bad rural broadband or an ISP having an afternoon would lock you out of something you’d paid for in full. The disc-drive claim is analyst speculation reported by Yahoo Tech on the 3rd of July, hedged with “could” throughout, and it isn’t Sony policy.

Preservation is the one I keep thinking about, though, because a disc is a physical artefact somebody can dump and archive and eventually run in an emulator long after the hardware and the storefront are gone, and a code is not an artefact of anything. Ubisoft demonstrated the endpoint when it switched off The Crew’s servers and turned a game people owned into a disc that spins and does nothing.

Anyway

I’ve started buying discs for things I’d have bought digitally without thinking about it, which I’m aware is a slightly silly response given they’ll all still work either way, and I’ve stopped part-exchanging anything. Four of the six games I’ve bought this year came second-hand from CEX and I’d like that to keep being possible. There’s about eighteen months left of this being a normal way to buy games and I intend to be annoying about it for all of them.