Physical vs. Digital Games | Why Sony Ending Disc Support Is About Ownership, Not Nostalgia
A 2,500-game collector breaks down the real numbers behind physical media's decline, and why the fight isn't digital vs. physical, it's ownership vs. leasing.
EDITIORIALS
Spencer K
8/1/202611 min read
After a month of radio silence from Sony, it's apparent that their decision to end support for physical media is final. The routes to truly change the future of gaming and preserve our beloved gaming media are bleak and complicated. As a collector of 2,500+ physical games and another 750+ digital, this subject hits close to home. I'm here to tell you that a majority of the arguments from both sides have some reasoning behind them, but many people are missing the bigger picture.
Physical media sales have slowed with the rise of on-demand subscription services and digital storefronts. But the waters are murky, with official numbers and statistics often skewed by major corporations. Companies like Sony and Xbox haven't been very transparent when it comes to digital or physical sales, frequently lumping in total sales and downloads with their respective game subscription services. Finding official player counts for most Xbox or PlayStation games is also rarely possible. Most official sales and player counts come directly from a game's publisher or developer, and when a game doesn't meet its sales quota, there's often no mention of official numbers at all. It's also common for companies to use skewed or misleading statistics to push a narrative, which I'll get into shortly. With all of that said, it's really hard to trust major companies when they control the narrative.
Steam vs. Sony: Why the Same Business Model Gets Treated So Differently
Ironically, the largest storefront on PC, Steam, is 100% digital and has still received far less backlash than Sony, largely because of how transparent it is. Live player counts can be found for nearly any game on the platform, and every game that uses generative AI in development is disclosed as such on its store page. So how is it that a 100% digital storefront is widely considered the best platform to game on, while Sony is getting dragged through the mud for announcing the retirement of physical media starting in 2028? It's essentially the same thing, right? Absolutely not.
The battle of physical vs. digital isn't really that simple. Many physical owners and collectors, myself included, buy physical copies so we can maintain true ownership of what we spend our hard-earned money on. The fact is, companies like Sony, Xbox, and Nintendo all have poor track records when it comes to guaranteeing that you truly own what you pay for. The same week Sony announced the discontinuation of physical media, they simultaneously announced the closure of the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita digital storefronts, rendering many digital-only games on those platforms lost media unless players rush to buy them before the shutdown. They've also removed over 500 previously purchased digital movies from customers' libraries due to a licensing dispute. Separately, YouTube TV delisted all Disney-related content following a recent licensing dispute of its own. The fact of the matter is, this isn't physical vs. digital, it's true ownership vs. leasing.
I'm not anti-digital by any means. I own over 500 digital games on Steam alone. The major difference between a platform like Steam and platforms like Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox is trust. At the end of the day, there's only one storefront on a Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox console. When you buy a PlayStation, you have to use the PlayStation Store. While the consoles themselves compete against each other for sales, what's available on each one is solely controlled by a single entity, its manufacturer. That's not a monopoly in the sense of console competition, but the manufacturers have complete control over every aspect of the platform once you buy their console. They control what you can and can't buy or play. If Sony decides a game is no longer profitable or worth supporting, it's gone. They've already proven they'll remove digital media when it suits them. Steam, on the other hand, doesn't own my PC. I have more storefront options than I can list. That healthy competition between multiple storefronts, combined with a strong customer service track record, is why I trust Steam over Sony.
The Customer Service Gap
Speaking of customer service, what's Sony's like? You can only return a game if you've never downloaded or launched it. So if you download a game and it turns out to be completely unplayable due to how bad or unfinished it is, too bad, your money is gone. The only exception is when a game is so notoriously broken that the entire player base gets refunded (shout-out to Concord). Is that really how a digital-only storefront should operate? Steam's return policy is far more consumer-friendly, giving you two full hours to try a game before deciding whether to keep it, and even more time if you file a dispute with good reasoning (it happened to me with Forza Horizon 6, so it's absolutely possible). Steam also has a much cleaner track record when it comes to removing content from players' libraries. Most instances of Steam pulling a game from someone's library are tied to piracy or illegal activity, rather than a simple licensing dispute. And shout-out to PlayStation for still not having a gift-a-game option in 2026.
Even if digital ownership were somehow guaranteed, there's still no guarantee you can access your games whenever you want. Internet outage? Can't verify the license. Console offline for more than 30 days? Can't verify the license. Xbox or PlayStation servers down, which has happened multiple times just in the past month? Can't verify the license. Account locked or banned? Every purchased digital license gets revoked, and you lose access to your entire library. Combined with poor customer support from Xbox and PlayStation, these issues have led to thousands of cases of players losing their entire digital libraries.
Essentially, what I'm trying to say is that I'm not against digital content. Myself and millions of other gamers simply don't trust major corporations like Sony to guarantee true ownership of what we buy digitally.
Is There Any Hope Left for Physical Media?
So what does this mean for physical media going forward? Is there any hope? I'd like to think there are still paths where physical media continues to be officially manufactured and distributed, but even those paths are unclear, and gamers may have to resort to more extreme measures to hold onto what they love.
First, all eyes are on Xbox. It's no secret they're developing their next console generation. The big question is whether this next generation will follow the same model as the Xbox Series S/X launch, releasing two versions, one with a disc drive and one without. Personally, I'm optimistic, but realistically, I don't think they will. The number of physical discs on store shelves has been dropping across the board, and Xbox has quietly led that decline, with store after store carrying little to no physical games for the current generation. While Sony made its retirement of physical media a public announcement, Xbox seems to be taking the quiet route instead.
What's the True Number of Gamers Who Prefer Physical Over Digital?
As mentioned earlier, the water is murky, and no one outside the major corporations truly knows the official numbers. Digital sales have undeniably risen, but so have sales across gaming as a whole. There are more game releases than ever, and the vast majority are indie or AA titles that launch digital-only until they build up enough sales to justify a physical release. That alone skews the numbers heavily toward digital, and it's not the only factor. Many modern games launch free-to-play digitally to build a larger player base before leaning on microtransactions, think Fortnite, Roblox, Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, Rocket League, Overwatch 2, Pokémon GO, Marvel Rivals, War Thunder, and plenty more. All of those downloads and in-game purchases pad the sales numbers in favor of digital, especially since most of these games don't even have physical releases, and the ones that do tend to sell poorly since players already have the free digital option.
Another misleading factor is that companies often group all platforms together when reporting total sales. Capcom recently shared that digital sales made up 93% of their total sales last quarter, leaving a grim 7% for physical. That looks like the final nail in the coffin for physical media until you realize that 60% of those digital sales came from PC, a platform that's digital-only to begin with. Once you exclude PC from the picture, the numbers tell a different story: a little over one in five console gamers bought a physical copy of a Capcom game last quarter.
That's still not enough to make physical sales competitive with digital overall, but it does show that, at any given time, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of console gamers still prefer physical media. That translates to 200,000 to 250,000 out of every million copies sold, and that's often just for a single game. Many of those same gamers buy physical copies of every game they want, meaning physical sales still add up to millions of units per year. Physical games have also struggled with shortages recently. Capcom titles like Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata saw their physical releases out of stock for months at a time, with restocks small and infrequent, a shortage that's likely contributed to lower physical sales numbers as well.
I could dive into the various conspiracies floating around, like Sony deploying a bot army to defend their decision, allegedly gagging employees and brand ambassadors from discussing it publicly, or paying major review outlets to push pro-digital narratives with misleading information. But I won't. At the end of the day, two things seem certain: Sony and other major corporations won't back down until they take a real financial hit, and an all-digital future is a loss for everyone.
The Real Cost of Going Digital
Another major reason I prefer physical over digital is the price of older games. Both Xbox and PlayStation caught backlash during their summer sales when their discounted digital games still cost more than a used physical copy from a secondhand retailer. It's genuinely more expensive to game digitally on console. Digital prices tend to stay near full price with rare deep discounts, while physical copies naturally lose value over time. It's hard not to see the goal here as destroying the secondhand market and raising the cost of games across the board, in a space where publishers have full control.
Disc rot is an argument against physical media that I find almost funny at this point. As mentioned, I own over 2,500 physical games. The only instances of disc rot I've ever encountered came from used games that were previously stored somewhere improper, like a garage, attic, or humid, sun-exposed space. I haven't had a single game in my own collection develop disc rot while in my possession.
It's fairly obvious that a majority of pro-Sony or pro-digital accounts online are either trolls, bots, or simply uninformed. Most "conversations" I've had with them boil down to the same copy-pasted, biased talking points, many sourced from AI platforms like Grok or Google AI (please don't do that; no school or college would ever accept that as a legitimate source). None of this is really about whether you're pro-digital. No one cares how you play your games. We care about how we play ours. Telling someone not to buy physical and to go all-digital instead is a bit like telling a kid allergic to broccoli that they should eat nothing but broccoli. In the end, that fifth to quarter of gamers isn't just going to accept an all-digital future quietly. They'll move to platforms that support physical media, migrate to digital platforms like Steam that actually support their user base, redirect their money toward other hobbies, or in some cases, turn to piracy.
Gaming's Great Piracy War
I could write an entire article on my views on emulation and piracy alone; there's a lot to unpack there. But before going further, I want to be clear: piracy is illegal. It means acquiring a digital product without the seller's consent. That said, it's exactly how many gamers, myself included, feel the industry is treating us: pushing subscription plans and digital-only games, then removing them from our libraries without our consent, all while insisting we never owned them in the first place, just a temporary license. Many gamers have started firing back with some version of, "If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing." I can't say that holds up legally, but I can see how, morally, it could become a massive movement in an all-digital world. Is this really the direction we want gaming to go? Mark my words: if Sony follows through on an all-digital future, with Xbox and Nintendo likely following suit, we'll be entering what I'd call gaming's Great Piracy War.
That name would almost make for a great pirate game title, but the reality is far more serious. If the 20 to 25 percent of console gamers who feel alienated turn to piracy, an already fragile industry stands to lose billions of dollars annually. Game sales drop, console sales drop, and overall profits take a serious hit. An industry already dealing with studio closures and developer layoffs would be devastated. I think this could realistically trigger a broader gaming recession, one where AAA games become rarer and less profitable than ever. Since 2024, AAA releases have struggled to crack the top 10 best-selling games of the year, while AA and indie titles have taken over. Just last year, AA and indie games like Expedition 33: Clair Obscur, Hades II, and Hollow Knight: Silksong dominated Game of the Year conversations, all developed on a fraction of the budget of their AAA competitors. Palworld, a 2024 AA release, surged to nearly a million concurrent players on Steam alone, more than two years after launch, once its 1.0 update dropped. How many AAA games are pulling in millions of players two years after release, following a content update? Barely any. Indie and AA titles have been outperforming AAA, and AAA studios simply can't absorb the financial hit of a boycott or piracy war.
A Possible Fix: Raise Physical Prices Instead of Killing Them
One solution to the manufacturing cost gap between physical and digital media: raise the price of physical games. Every collector understands that physical media costs more to manufacture and ship, and that retailers need their own margin on top of that. A modest markup on physical copies to match digital profit margins would be reasonable and expected. Instead, companies have chosen to raise the price of digital games while retiring physical media altogether. We need to recognize as a community that these intentions aren't really about fair profit, they're about total control and maximum corporate extraction. They're not just trying to make money; they're trying to extract every possible dollar while giving less and less in return. Leasing still isn't owning, so what do you actually get in return? A future of permanently renting your games is already here, and many of us didn't speak up until it was too late.
In the end, play however you want, with whatever you want. The only thing that makes no sense is gamers telling other gamers what or how to play, and yet here we are. Nowhere in this article did I tell you what or how to play. I laid out player preferences backed by facts and shared my prediction for where an all-digital future might lead. People can say whatever they want about my collection or about physical media in general, but in the end, I'll be the one still fully able to access over 2,500 physical games without issue, while others navigate internet outages, server outages, corporate ownership disputes, and removed digital content.
Thank you to everyone for reading this longer article. I love gaming, and I needed to get some of this off my chest. Comment a duck emoji under Life is a Game's X post so we know who the real ones are.
