Sony recently announced that it will stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in 2028, officially entering the digital era. As soon as the news came out, players around the world were instantly shocked. Now there is a rather exaggerated data. PlayStation’s official X (formerly Twitter) post announcing the “cancellation of the physical version” actually had more views than Rockstar’s official posts of two “Grand Theft Auto VI (Grand Theft Auto 6)” trailers.
Players are not here to like it, but to criticize it!
GamesRadar pointed out that this does not mean that Sony’s popularity surpasses “GTA 6”. Quite the opposite! A large number of players poured into the comment area to express their dissatisfaction, protesting against Sony’s abandonment of physical discs, weakening players’ ownership of games, and the possibility of losing the rights to second-hand transactions, collections and preservation of games in the future, so the traffic of posts continued to surge. Many players even bluntly said that this is PlayStation’s most controversial decision in recent years.
An announcement set off the entire gaming circle
Sony stated that it stopped issuing physical discs in response to the trend of players gradually turning to digital purchases, so new PlayStation games launched after 2028 will all be converted to digital versions. However, after the announcement of this policy, not only players rebounded, but industry figures such as “Death Stranding” producer Hideo Kojima and former PlayStation Studios head Shawn Layden also publicly expressed concerns about the future of digitalization.
So far, Sony has not provided further explanation in response to the massive criticism from the outside world. But this incident has proved one thing. Even “GTA 6” may not be able to steal players’ attention from the “cancellation of the physical version”.