What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

By now, everyone and their grandmother has heard that Sony plans to end physical game releases on PlayStation consoles. This simultaneously disappointing and not-at-all-surprising news feels like it has been coming for years. In an industry determined to squeeze every last drop of blood from every available stone, it was only a matter of time before ownership itself was thrown to the wayside.

Oh, and welcome back to Love Letters, an ongoing series where I gush about the things I love. Or, in this case, deliver a eulogy for something we are slowly losing.

As an elder millennial, the desire to collect things has been baked directly into my lizard brain. If it wasn’t trading cards, it was digital tokens in your average video game, stacks of CDs, or watching my parents hoard Beanie Babies like doomsday preppers stockpiling canned water. Call it gambling, peer pressure, or clever marketing aimed directly at children. Whatever it was, it hung heavy in the air.

I’m not here to reinvent the wheel on Sony’s announcement. Others have already covered it more eloquently and intelligently than I could ever hope to. Short story made long, Sony plans to discontinue physical disc production for all new games released on PlayStation consoles beginning in January 2028. Games released before then are supposedly safe, but anything new after that cutoff will be digital-only.

Sony says this reflects customer preference and broader market trends, but don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining.

This isn’t a new concept, but that doesn’t make it any less transparent or egregious. Games have been slipping download codes, paper discs, and glorified permission slips inside otherwise empty boxes for a decade or more. Every time it happens, people ridicule it. Yet the practice keeps spreading.

When a modern game skips a standard physical edition, collectors are pushed toward companies such as Limited Run Games or First Press Games for the possibility of eventually placing something on a shelf. That raises another question: will those companies even have a path forward once Sony stops producing discs? Will the next console generation offer any physical option, or will every system simply be another slim, digital-only PlayStation 5?

This leads to the much larger question: what does it actually mean to own media?

Gamers with longer memories will remember the industry trying this before, shifting toward the idea that games are not commodities but licenses purchased for temporary admission into the gaming experience. YOU don’t OWN the game. You simply own the right to play THEIR game for as long as they allow it.

With a physical product, there is at least some degree of independence. I can play All-Pro Football 2K8 because I own the disc and an Xbox 360 capable of reading it. I don’t need the game to remain listed in a storefront or a licensing agreement between two corporations to remain friendly. I have the disc. I have the machine. The game works.

What happens when that game exists only as lines of code inside a console and a pile of bytes on a hard drive? What happens when the storefront closes, the license expires, or the company decides maintaining access is no longer worth the trouble?

In beating another dead horse, does the industry eventually move almost entirely into the live-service and subscription model it has pushed for more than a decade? What comes after physical media disappears? How far can companies shift the line now that they have momentum? And why am I asking you all these questions like you personally signed the paperwork?

When I started writing this, I wanted it to be positive and lighthearted. I wanted to discuss my ongoing love affair with vinyl records, VHS tapes, CDs, cartridges, and disc-based games. There is something satisfying about holding a piece of media, looking at the cover art, sliding it onto a shelf, and knowing it is yours. But like the world’s worst bad apple, the video game industry keeps finding ways to spoil the few good things we have left.

This isn’t simply about money or a lack of interest in physical games. I’ve already written plenty about how much money changes hands in this industry in I’ll Be On Tomorrow for My Dailies, Golden Era for Gamers, Brutal Era for Developers, and Ethics in Video Game Consumption. This is about an industry proposing something insane, pulling back slightly after the backlash, and then ramming through a marginally less terrible version that suddenly looks reasonable by comparison.

If Sony walks this back, pay close attention to what happens afterward. The replacement may sound better only because the original proposal was so aggressively miserable.

To bring this back around the horn, actually possessing a product will always be more appealing to me than temporary digital rights to access it. Physical media can be displayed, traded, loaned, resold, rediscovered, and pulled from a dusty box twenty years later. It exists beyond a username and password.

Besides, what good is the shelf if you can’t fill it with your favorite music, movies, and games?

I hope there is some long-term workaround that preserves meaningful ownership for video games. Maybe specialty publishers survive. Maybe consumer backlash changes the plan. Maybe another company realizes there is value in being the one platform that still lets people own what they buy.

Or maybe we’ll all be paying $19.99 a month for the privilege of remembering the games we used to have.

I guess we’ll find out in a few years.