ITS OVER Sony Interactive Entertainment to end physical game disc production in January 2028

[Shadow1980]

I was busy yesterday and didn't have time to reply, but here's my two cents and some added change.

To put it bluntly, fuck this, fuck Sony, and fuck everyone who helped enable this. Looks like my days of buying new games is coming to an end. I've been consistently saying for many years both here and elsewhere that any console maker that pulls the trigger on digital-only will lose my support. That means no PS6 for me. I guess that'll save me at least $1000. I have a feeling Helix won't support discs, either. MS does have a golden opportunity to take advantage of this and still support discs on the Helix and offer an optional Blu-ray drive for movies and disc-based games, but I'm not holding my breath. It also wouldn't surprise me if the Switch 3 ends up being digital only once it releases some time next decade, so it looks like the Switch 2 will probably the last new console I will have ever bought. At least I'll have decades worth of older games to give me enjoyment for the rest of my life.

And of course the video game industry ends up being the first segment of the entertainment industry to pull the trigger on digital-only. I would have figured it would have been music given how quickly most people shifted to digital, but I can still easily go out and buy CDs and vinyl records. Interestingly, when it comes to full albums, sales were always majority physical, and physical albums have rebounded a bit in sales. Digital just put the focus back on singles in the 21st century and lots of people just stopped buying albums. But physical albums, along with physical books and seemingly also physical home video, are here to stay.

This really has been the worst decade for video games. COVID shortages, price hikes caused by trade wars, an actual war, and "A.I.," and now this latest kick in the gonads. 40 years of this being my main hobby, and now companies like RockStar and Sony and certainly more to follow are telling people like me who want to actually own their games to either deal with it or fuck off.

The galling thing about all of this is that Sony is lying by omission about the demand for digital. As the old saying goes "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." While companies cannot lie about things like revenue, profits, operating costs, and all the other boilerplate stuff that comes out in quarterly reports (which is also why I don't doubt the PS2 sold 160M, esp. considering we know the final production number was well over that), the video game industry has long had problems with transparency when it comes to concrete sales data. Xbox hasn't included quarterly shipment data in their reports for over a decade. Some companies don't report unit sales for their software, that is unless a game passes some big milestone and they want to brag about it in their PR. This also includes things like physical/digital splits. Take a look at Sony's gaming revenue reports from just a few years ago:

Looks like digital was already dominating even then, doesn't it? Digital software was generating 3.87x as much revenue as physical in FY2020, and in FY2021 that increased to 4.43x. But look at the footnotes. They are including literally every digital game into a big pool labelled "Digital Software." That includes many games that aren't even available in stores. If you look at actual splits for specific titles or just retail-release games in general, we see a different story. Here's what Sony's own first-party sales data was showing from the same time period:

This data shows considerably lower percentages for the actual physical/digital split. Most of these games were majority physical, many by a considerable margin. Granted, that's only first-party games, and was from a few years ago, but the splits aren't too dissimilar from what we see with older PS4 games. There was some more data from mid-2023 (just three years ago) that let us extrapolate for certain games, which were still majority physical. For example, we know God of War Ragnarok had sold 11M copies by Feb. 2023 and 15M by Nov. 19, 2023, yet by June 11 of that same year fewer than 4.25M copies were digital. Horizon Forbidden West had sold 8.4M by May 9, 2023, but just a few weeks later the game had accumulated digital sales of almost 2.35M. So, we know at least those two games were overwhelmingly physical.

Maybe things have accelerated a lot over the past three years, but I have sincere doubts that a majority of retail-release games are like 70-80%+ digital. Not when we had games just three years ago that were still sub-40% or even sub-30% digital. What's the splits for Spider-Man 2, Resident Evils 8, 4R, & 9, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, among other recent games both first- and third-party?

This entire situation reeks of unbridled corporate greed. It's not simply a money grab to pocket the savings from not having to manufacture & ship discs or deal with the retailer's cut. It's also a full-on power grab. Corporations, particularly those involving tech, don't want their customers to actually own anything. As I've been saying for years, you give up a lot when cede ownership and therefore control of your purchases to the company taking your money. Look at the whole Studio Canal situation on PS5, or the similar situation that almost happened with Discovery content a couple of years ago. All it takes it a licensing dispute or any of a host of other reasons for digital content to just be taken away from you, without even a refund or exchange offered. And that's just with downloads. We've all seen movies and shows vanish from streaming services, many of them seemingly gone forever. A licensing agreement ends or the service's owner just wants to get rid of something for a tax write-off, and *poof* it's gone.

The capitalist class, ironically, doesn't seem to actually like capitalism. It feels almost like they'd prefer feudalism, where they own everything and the serfs basically rent everything. Except I don't think they even want that, given how desperate they are to replace all of us with machines. They pat themselves on the back for inventing fully-automated restaurants & retail establishments or drowning the Internet with "A.I." slop, because that means that everything from burger flipper and shelf stocker to actor and writer cease to be occupations. Meanwhile, we're woefully unprepared for a society where we could potentially see very large percentages of the population become permanently unemployable. Given the political proclivities of some of these CEOs, I wouldn't be surprised if they just deem the working class to be "useless eaters." Now where have I heard that phrase before?

Tell me, was all of this anti-consumer bullshit were going to be subjected to really worth not get off the couch to switch out discs, or having to go to a store to buy a game? Are we really that lazy as a culture? Is a marginal increase in convenience worth forfeiting ownership and control of the stuff you buy. This isn't going to stop with video games. Countless things that used to be products are now subscription services. Things that are still nominally sold as products are being tacitly treated, in part or in whole, as services you don't technically own. We've seen this with things ranging from major appliances to cars to farm equipment. There's even rental services for regular old street clothes. People are increasingly unable to afford to buy houses or vehicles. Do people just not like taking responsibility for their stuff or their own lives in general and they'd just rather rent everything? 

"You will own nothing and be happy."

To that I say, "Ownership is power." This is what power looks like, people:

Innocuous, and maybe not the biggest collection, but impactful in its implications (and that's not everything, just what's in my living room). My house, my stuff. I own it. I can dispose of these things as I see fit just as much as I can with anything else in my home. I can sell them off, gift them, or lend them at my own discretion, or I can keep them forever. There's still a second-hand market for generations of discs and cartridges I can still go out and buy, because someone else decided to and was well within their rights to sell them off. Some of my old games were hand-me-downs. But it's all actual property, transferred to me legally in accordance with United States federal laws dealing with the first-sale doctrine, which explicitly refer to a person who takes legal possession of a physical copy an "owner of a particular copy." To the people who published those things, well, to begrudgingly appropriate what gun nuts like to say: "μολὼν λαβέ."

Power belongs to the people, not an unelected class of elites, be they capitalists or central planners or whoever the hell else. I don't give a shit what symbol is on the boot on my neck, be it a dollar sign, a hammer & sickle, a swastika, or a cross. I don't want a fucking boot on my neck. Any anyone that tries to take control of my personal property away from me is a tyrant. Like any good leftie, I differentiate between "personal property" (one's home, all their personal affects therein, etc.), and "private property" (i.e., the means of production). With personal property, power ought to belong to the individual who spent their time and labor earning what they bought. With productive property, well, that's a conversation for another time, but TL;DR fuck billionaires and fuck central planning. But suffice it to say that the slow, steady demise of the concept of regular people actually owning personal property isn't an accident. It's what the billionaires want. Because ownership is power. They want total control over we the serfs, because anyone who's a billionaire is by definition someone who got where they are by exploiting people and they're all have to varying degree psychopathy and massive God complexes. Yesterday's news is just the latest symptom of a disease that's killing society, a disease called capitalism. It's not even late-stage anymore. It's final stage. People have long complained about big corporations all the time, and rightfully so, but continue to cede power to them. Now everybody is reaping what's been sown, whether or not they were one of the sowers. All are punished.

Anyway, rant over. This news has killed my interest in the future of gaming. I have one more thing to post elsewhere, and then I'm taking a break from this site for a while. I'll still pop in from time to time if there's a game I'm interested and still have the ability to buy physically. Ultimately, I may dip out entirely once this generation is over. Fifteen-ish years would still be a good run. Why continue to express interest in discussing things like game sales or gaming in general when the industry is steadily moving in a direction that deliberately excludes people like me? Honestly, if the console market implodes from all of these, fuck it. It's deserved. Hopefully Nintendo doesn't do anything stupid because they're the last bastion for physical, it seems, though with third parties there's already cracks.