re: Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation

Maybe report "news" from actual journalists?

Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here.

ETA: Playstation is getting ridiculed 24 hours a day at this point. Somehow there are still people here defending them.

quote:

---

violently

---

you owned yourself and now are pretending I'm "violently" lashing out. You're embarrassing yourself.

There absolutely is a market for physical video games. 15% of all PS game sales is still millions of games and tens of millions of revenue.

Sony could absolutely profitably serve that market as a niche if they wanted to. Charge publishers more for disc orders, publishers would probably order smaller quantities of physical discs and sell them directly as custom orders at a premium, the same way limited quantity collectors editions are.

Niche products exist all over the place. Most physical proponents are diehards and would absolutely pay an extra $10 up front for a disc version.

The issue is that unlike something like vinyl records where anybody can just press them, Sony is the gatekeeper to all discs and they are actively wanting to kill off this segment of the market.

They clearly think whatever money they lose from this they will make up from killing the resell market and elbowing out retailers for their cuts.

Smart call by Sony here, no one buys physical anymore and the profit margins are even lower for those sales. Zero reason to keep it around just like Rockstar and the new Xbox.

A very small vocal minority on social media is completely meaningless. Every single quarter physical sales drop more and more. By the time a PS6 releases you'll be under 10% of game sales being physical. Just no point. No one has a disc drive, stop losing money to make discs.

Not just digital sales but also profit margin, estimates show $2-4 per game for physical media. Split the middle and say $3, that's $3M in lost money per 1 million copies sold.

For several games a year and bigger ones at that, it adds up quickly.

2025 Sony estimated 60-75 million physical copies sold, at an average of $3 lost per sale to create the physical editions, that's $180M-225M lost.

It's also rapidly shrinking, Q4 had the lowest physical sales on record at just 15%.

It often goes by prestige of the game and first party selling the most physical copies, Ghost of Yotei was the highest at 34% physical sales while yearly titles like Madden, FIFA etc go as low as 12% physical and all the numbers decline more and more every quarter.

quote:

---

There absolutely is a market for physical video games. 15% of all PS game sales is still millions of games and tens of millions of revenue.

---

And that includes games that never had a physical version in the first place. It's not an apples to apples comparison.

The honest numbers comparing physical game sales to digital game sales for games that offer both a physical and a digital version are much much closer.

My primary concern with the loss of a physical market is that Sony is going to have a de facto monopoly with their digital storefront. Retailers, secondary markets, and the like create an incentive for digital sales. That will all go away now.

It’s obvious that the market largely preferred digital regardless but I wonder if the sales will diminish in a purely digital market.

It’s not a one to one comparison when you look at pc which has been fully digital for a while. The pc market has various digital storefronts in direct competition with one another, discount key sites, easier options for piracy, etc.

I don’t care about physical at all for my own consumer preferences but it’s a concern about where Sony goes from here.