"If You Don't Own It, What Are You Buying?" Asks Sony's Former Studios Chief

Sony has not killed your disc library. It has done something quieter and, over time, more consequential: it has announced that from January 2028 no new PlayStation game will be made on a disc at all.

I want to be exact about that, because the loudest version of this story is wrong and the real one is bad enough. On July 1, 2026, Sony Interactive Entertainment said production of physical discs for all new games on PlayStation consoles will end starting in January 2028. New games will then be sold through the PlayStation Store and through retailers, in digital formats only. ^[5]

Games already out on disc, or arriving on disc before the cutoff, are explicitly unaffected. Nothing in the announcement says existing discs will stop working. ^[5]

My position is simple. Making digital the only way to buy new games takes away a choice that mattered, and the choice mattered because of what it protected: resale, lending, collecting and, in the long run, the survival of the games themselves.

The best case for Sony

Sony has a real argument, and I will give it its due. The company says digital is now the preferred format for most of its community, and that it will keep offering choices about where players buy, naming retailers and its own store. ^[5] Anyone who has watched a console download a 90-gigabyte game while the disc sat unread in the tray knows how much of the disc was already ceremony.

Shawn Layden, who chaired Sony's worldwide studios group until he left in 2019, concedes the convenience himself. He told The Expansion Pass podcast that downloads are easy and he did not know the financial pressures behind the decision, since he was not involved in it. ^[3]

But look at what the man who ran PlayStation's studios then did with that concession. He estimated that perhaps 20% of players still do not choose digital. That is his guess, not a measured market share, and nobody should dress it up as one. ^[2][3] Even so, he called that group important and described physical collectors as among the most faithful players the platform has. ^[2][3]

That is the heart of it. A company can be right that most people have moved on and still be wrong to shut the door on the rest. Sony is not responding to a dwindling habit. It is ending one, on a date of its own choosing, for the people who have bought the most games and stayed the longest.

What a purchase turns out to be

Layden's headline line has gone round the industry for a reason. Reported by both IGN and Video Games Chronicle, it is the question he says digital buyers should now ask: "If you don't own it, what are you buying?" ^[2][3]

His answer, as the reports have it, is that the debate shifts from owning a game to having access to a digital asset. If you cannot resell an item, he argued, the claim that you own it is undermined. ^[2][3] He also called the disc decision "a significant brand hit," in VGC's account of his remarks, and warned that players will imagine worst-case scenarios that damage Sony's reputation. ^[3]

He is right, and Sony's own paperwork shows why the worst cases are not paranoid. The US Software Product License Agreement says software is licensed, not sold. It says Sony makes no commitment to keep online servers available, that it may end online features, and that it reserves the right to discontinue software support. ^[1]

I should be careful here. That agreement applies to US residents and notes that other agreements may govern software from other publishers. ^[1] It does not say Sony will pull every game you have bought, and plenty of games need no server at all. What it establishes is the shape of the relationship. You hold a permission, and the other party writes the terms.

A disc was always a clumsy answer to that problem, but it was an answer. A game on a shelf can be lent to a friend, sold to a stranger, found in a charity shop in 2040 and played by someone who was not born when it was made. A licence tied to an account can do none of those things unless the licensor lets it.

In my house, memory lives mostly in objects, and I have learned how much more reliable a shoebox is than a promise. Games are younger than photographs, but the lesson carries.

The preservation problem

There is a movement built on this worry. Stop Killing Games describes its campaign as a push for legal protections against publishers making games unplayable when support ends, including games that rely on central servers. ^[6]

It is an advocacy group, and its account of its own goals is not independent evidence about Sony's disc policy. But its existence tells you how many players have already watched a game they paid for go dark.

A disc-only world would not have solved that, and I will not pretend it would. A disc for a game that needs servers is a coaster once the servers go.

Yet a disc was a physical thing a collector, a library or a museum could hold on to, and a console could read it years later. Sony's decision removes that for every new game, at the exact moment more games are built around the assumption that someone, somewhere, will keep the lights on.

History has a way of punishing industries that treat their own past as a cost. Film studios let silent pictures rot in vaults because nobody saw a reason to keep them. Games are art by any fair measure, and an art form that can only be rented from its publisher has no archive except the publisher's goodwill.

The backlash is real, and Sony has noticed

It is not only critics with a podcast. A Change.org petition asking Sony to keep making disc-based PlayStation games showed 386,266 verified signatures when I read it. That is the platform's count and not a survey of all PlayStation owners. ^[7]

The petition is run on behalf of PNP Games, and it describes itself as speaking for retailers, distributors, manufacturers and collectors. ^[7] Its claims that digital-only distribution threatens resale, lending, collecting and preservation are the organisers' case, and a reader should weigh them as such. Some of those signers have a business interest.

Most of the argument, though, stands without the petition, because it rests on Sony's own licence and Sony's own announcement.

Sony's response so far is cool. Chief financial officer Lin Tao said on an earnings call, as reported by Inven Global, that the company had seen no business impact at that point and understood users' attachment to discs. He added that Sony would keep considering how to respond to those voices. ^[4]

That is a sympathetic sentence with nothing in it. "No business impact" is what a company says when it has not yet had to count the cost.

Inven also relayed a claim from the YouTube channel Moore's Law Is Dead that Sony sent developers a survey indirectly probing physical sales. Sony has not confirmed it, and it would be a mistake to read it as a sign of a change of heart. ^[4]

What you should do about it

There is a long runway. About 18 months separate the announcement from the cutoff, and Sony has said that games on disc before then are untouched. ^[5] That is time to decide what you value.

If you care about owning games, buy the ones you love on disc while the choice exists. Read the licence you agreed to, which takes less time than a patch download. And if you think a game you pay full price for should still be playable when its publisher loses interest, say so to Sony and to your lawmakers, where such rules are made.

Sony may still answer the open questions, such as whether boxed download codes will remain at retail or whether any physical option survives through licensed partners. It has not yet done so. ^[5]

Sony says its players prefer digital. If that is true, it hardly needs to ban the alternative. The company that is so sure of its customers' taste should be happy to let the disc die of natural causes.