Sony's Decision To Ditch Discs Was Practically Inevitable, Data Shows (arstechnica.com) 24
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many gamers have been lamenting Sony's recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision. In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana's tracking data on physical game sales in the U.S. dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the U.S. in the last 12 months.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to "the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms," while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing "percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s" in that spending.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the U.S. so far this year.
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the U.S. was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to "the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms," while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing "percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s" in that spending.
Translation (Score:1)
You will own nothing and like it.
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No problem Karl.
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For gaming, that ship sailed when most games started requiring server-side infrastructure. Even if you do own the physical disc, a lot of good it'll do you if the servers have been shut down.
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you will own nothing, pay a subscription to get your purchases downloaded, can have it taken away at any moment, and like it.
Fixed it for you.
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To be fair... (Score:2)
The problem I always had, historically, with games on DVD is they'd kind of "beat up" the optical drive, seeking all over the disc constantly while the game was loading and then being played.
It wouldn't have been so bad if they simply copied everything onto the console's hard drive or SSD when first installed. But games like God of War on my PS2 are what I blame for the drive wearing out so it got constant I/O errors trying to run anything.
I had the same experience with a couple of PS3s that our kids used a
The Real Issue (Score:2)
It wasn't inevitable, but it's true that the discs were just tokens at this point: full of outdated software that needed a multi-GB patch to get working, or just a stub containing some artwork and a license key. PC games haven't really shipped on discs in years, if not decades. Sure, you could buy the disc, but it would be useless once the "CD key" was bound to your account. At a certain point you just give up and buy the keys. The last PC game I bought on disc (DOOM in 2016) came with the discs in a nice S
Should have come sooner (Score:2)
I didn't buy a Playstation for years and year become of the atrocious load times. I hate wasting my time for games to load and to read from CD/DVD. These days I avoid HDs and SSDs because god have us NVMe...and when some of us have read speeds of 5000mb/s Sony is ditching optical.
It's like
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Discs have only been a distribution mechanism now for 2+ generations. You don't run the game off the disc it just installs it to the HD. (Then layers in a 12 GB patch anyways). Two sets of people benefit: those that want to resell the title and those that don't want the gigantic download. The no download crew is pretty much lost as you generally need "day 0" patch to make the game anything but a buggy mess, so this is 100% about resale.
Actually a huge money-maker, just not for them (Score:3)
Optical Limitations (Score:2)
Ignoring sales figures for a moment, I'm honestly perplexed why everyone is missing the glaringly obvious reason for the death of optical media
1) storage density.
2) storage bandwidth.
Nobody wants to wait 20+ minutes to load a single level in a game. Developers are making games larger and larger, well beyond the capacity of a BluRay disk. Optical density has not kept up with increasing storage demands. The technology simply isn't there today, and there is little incentive to continue to invest into higher de
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Technically speaking, they could just ship the game in USB cartridges, consoles have USB ports that absolutely obliterate the hell out of discs, are probably fast enough to actually run the games off em instead of mandatory disc installs.
But sony is dumb at marketing.
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Flash storage has gone up in cost due to AI mania, so at this point it probably would just make more sense to sell USB hardware dongles that are just license keys. Most games are also shipped with numerous bugs and missing features these days too, since it is just assumed they can push out an update later, so you probably don't want to be playing v1.0 anyway.
Plus, the real reason they want to kill physical media is because eliminating used game sales is also part of their goal.
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They could, but that runs counter to what they want.
They want to kill resale and while they are at it, take control of whether you can play your game as purchased a few years ago, or make you have to buy a remaster, or just not be able to play them and play something new they can get revenue for instead.
They have sorted out that the vast vast majority of their user base will run games on whatever terms the console picks. Alienating the minority is worth it to assert that much control over the experiences o
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That's gonna add an extra $10-$20 to the cost of the game though compared to a disc that's a few cents
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Games haven't run off disc for a while, they install to the drive. Even HDD loading speeds are intolerable in a lot of games, forget about optical.
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I'm honestly perplexed why everyone is missing the glaringly obvious reason for the death of optical media
1) storage density.
2) storage bandwidth.
Nobody wants to wait 20+ minutes to load a single level in a game. Developers are making games larger and larger, well beyond the capacity of a BluRay disk. Optical density has not kept up with increasing storage demands.
So, in MY perfect world, we'd be going back to cartridges, where the 'cartridge' is basically a 256GB NVMe drive, so the game cartridge could theoretically be patched on-media, load times would be far lower, and there wouldn't be nearly as much dependency on massive storage on the console itself.
The reason why it will never happen this way, is because NVMe drives, even at Sony-levels of purchase, would be a significant portion of the game itself. If Sony got 256GB drives at $30 a pop wholesale (about half o
poor track record (Score:2)
People wouldn't miss their discs so much if Sony did a better job protecting access to digital libraries.