Honestly the first outcome you described sounds worse than the second.

The only justification I see for not doing physical copies of games anymore is people will have more physical space and there will be more resources available for other products. The cons still outweigh the pros though.

I wondered how this got 18 pages so quickly.
Seems to be mostly fighting and shitty takes.

1) Stop fighting. It's just filler people have to read through.
2) Have good takes As in put thought into it. No just gifs. Lets avoid short sentences etc.

Or I start thread banning people. Or maybe just locking the thread if that is what the OP wants.

Retailers will have very little reason to have sales or discounts on games, they don’t make anything off of digital stuff. It’s not the same as a digital storefront. 

Thanks. I was getting sick of a lack of constructive responses in this thread.

Indie and AA have been shitting on AAA slop for years and years now. But this is the most likely scenario simply because a majority of people already buy digital.

The other problem with discontinuing physical games is the fall of retail game stores. How can retail game stores survive on just selling the consoles?

Also this is a real dick move from Sony. The PS6 being digital only would've gotten backlash but people wouldn't have been surprised by it and current PS5 owners who prefer physical could've just decided to not buy the PS6 and continued buying physical games for their PS5's a good deal into the 2030's but now its physical life is gonna get cut short massively. That is genuinely a fuck you to a lot of the most hardcore Playstation fans who have been with the platform for decades.

I'm so pissed that I just came back from the grave

Big store retailers like Wally and Target will be fine and probably still carry consoles and accessories because the markups on them can be large. Game stores though, they can’t and they won’t. GameStop is either going to go out of business or fully transition to a retro chain.

Sony doesn’t even sell digital game codes anymore, they stopped doing that last gen. I wonder if they will even bother bringing them back.

Buying large games digitally is still not an option for me in the current year. Even on PC, I don't have the storage space for multiple AAA games of over 100 GB each. I've already avoided buying a few games for this reason.

GTA6 is going to be the last big hurrah for an era. I can easily believe that half of PS5/XS owners will get it, but then what? Who is going to sell consoles, a product that historically brings in very little net revenue, if there is no chance to make money on software? Why should GameStop, Best Buy, Walmart, or Target sell consoles? Is Sony confident enough to basically cut away thousands of retailers in the USA alone?