Last week, Sony announced that they would no longer be making physical discs for new games starting in January 2028. This was met with an overwhelmingly negative response. From a larger forest perspective, I get the negative response. Getting rid of discs also gets rid of the sense of ownership. It gets rid of the secondary used game market. It forces you to buy games at digital stores, which presumably makes Sony more money. These are just the negatives off the top of my head. I'm sure there are numerous other negative impacts this decision makes. From an individual tree perspective (I'm sticking with the forest and trees analogy), I'm not sure that I really care all that much.
Since 2020, I have purchased all of my games digitally. Over the past 5-10 years, I have purged (read donated) a lot of my CDs, DVDs, and game discs. I have posted about this process here and here. I absolutely get the concept of ownership that comes with having a physical disc. What I didn't like, however, was having a house full of bookshelves of discs and their cases. Plus, the ease of switching from one game to another (or one song to another or one movie to another) digitally is so much easier when you don't have to swap out discs. Once I wrapped my mind around having less clutter and improved ease of switching between media, I was sold on digital media. I've actually never used my optical drive on my PS5 to play games. I read that around 80% of games sold these days are sold digitally without a disc, and if this is true than the majority of people are already ditching discs.
The concept of playing old games on old systems is something that I understand on paper, but in reality I don't personally have any use for this, and I wonder how often people actually do this. Don't get me wrong. I play older games all of the time. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy VII and The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages. I'm certainly not playing them on Playstation 1 or GameBoy Color. Next to my PS5, I have a PS2, N64, and NES on shelves on my entertainment center. I have them sitting there as decoration and for nostalgia to great previous gaming eras. I couldn't connect them to my current TV even if I wanted to, since none of them have HDMI ports and my TV only has HDMI ports (I'm not saying it's impossible, but it isn't as easy as just connecting them with the cables that came with the system). The point is, I could have multiple old video game systems sitting around and figure out how to connect all of them to modern TVs (or have older TVs also sitting around), as well as shelves of likely 100s of discs and game cartridges, or I can just move on with the times and play the older games on newer systems. Yes, you may have to rebuy them, but I am OK with that given the aforementioned logistical struggles of playing older systems.
Listen, I get the frustration. I think it stinks that at some point in the future, we will no longer have gaming stores filled with older games and their discs. But for me personally, this will not affect how I play games. I've been disc free for 6 years and I haven't missed them.
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