Death of the disc: Why Sony’s move matters beyond video games

A kind description of my home would call it well stocked with traditional media. More than 1,000 books line the walls and pile up on tables. Cupboards are cluttered with DVDs, jigsaw puzzles and video game discs, and the living room boasts a stereo with a vacuum-tube amplifier to play my husband’s LP collection.

Even so, we are not purists. We subscribe to video and music streaming services, and buy e-books and audiobooks. And we certainly are not alone.

Despite the wide take-up of digital entertainment, physical media retains a hold on an important, and in some cases growing, share of consumer purchases.

But the video game industry has no interest in serving omnivorous consumers like me. In June, Rockstar Games, maker of the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series, opted for purely digital sales for the hotly anticipated release of GTA VI – a box bought at a store has only a download code inside. Sony has followed with plans to discontinue physical disc sales for all PlayStation games in 2028.

Sony argues that the change will “align more closely” with customer preferences. About 85 per cent of PlayStation games were downloaded in the last quarter, and physical games account for just 5 per cent of industrywide sales because most PC game purchases have shifted online already.

But media companies should be wary about writing off the old fogeys too quickly.

Sales of e-books as a share of consumer book purchases peaked above 20 per cent in the 2010s, but now hover at about half that. Physical books withstood both that assault and the rise of audiobooks; hard copies still account for nearly three-quarters of consumer book sales. The revival of the vinyl record is even more remarkable. Amid competition from CDs, sales plunged below one million annually in the 2000s before rebounding to almost 46 million, or close to 10 per cent of industry revenue.

Part of the joy of physical media comes from tangible possession, but there is more than just nostalgia at work. Studies show that people reading on paper understand and retain six to eight times more information than those using screens. Vinyl records are widely considered to capture sound more completely.

Physical movies do not suffer when internet service is spotty, and some viewers value the higher quality. Although overall DVD sales continue to lose out to streaming, purchases of high-quality 4K Blu-ray discs rose 12 per cent in the US in 2025.

There are also fundamental legal differences that disadvantage customers. When you buy a paper book or an LP, it is yours to keep, donate or resell. A digital purchaser, by contrast, receives a licence to access material that cannot be passed on. For the video game companies, eliminating discs means they will finally kill off a once-vibrant second-hand market that competed for gamer dollars.

With a digital licence, access also depends on the continued willingness of the seller to keep the material online. Most people have encountered the irritation of having a film drop out of the Netflix catalogue, and Amazon famously yanked copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from customer Kindle devices after discovering a copyright problem.

Sony made clear last week that this risk remains when it announced that it would stop supporting some older online games, limiting future playability.

Some customers have tried to fight back. Players angry about Ubisoft’s 2024 shutdown of The Crew, an online racing game, founded the group Stop Killing Games and garnered 1.3 million signatures on a petition asking Brussels to prevent entertainment companies from withdrawing support for online games. Though the European Parliament concluded that it lacked the power to keep games alive, it plans to work with industry to develop a code of conduct for managing the end-of-life stage.

In the US, the state of California in 2025 barred sellers of e-books and streamed music, movies and games from using words such as “buy” and “purchase” unless they warn customers they are receiving only a licence, or allow permanent downloads.

Streaming also poses a broader cultural threat. If the vast majority of original music, art and literature is stored together on the servers of a few big corporations, no one can stop them from erasing less profitable items or bowing to government censorship.

“It puts all the responsibility for preserving material in the hands of companies, and that’s just not their business model,” says Aaron Perzanowski, a University of Michigan law professor. “We need somebody else to do that work.” FINANCIAL TIMES