I guess my point is, that is one reason Xbox failed and Nintendo succeeded. Modern hardware. Imagine if the Xbox was NVidia + ARM + SDcard/SSD. I think it would have succeeded and not failed, despite the lack of games. The RTX 3070 with 16GB of VRAM would have been an amazing console in 2020. People would have stopped buying discs in 2020, and had other physical options. The CPU portion would basically be free, die size wise, and the power use would be so low it would also save money.

I think the irony of it all is that optical media is still by far the cheapest way to store large amounts of data. Unfortunately from the 8th gen forward (excluding Wii U), it didn't help much as the consoles can't run the games off the discs anymore. Had they found a way to double down on optical media, developing it further like they did with Blu-ray back in the day, their console would only need a fraction of the internal storage they currently need, and they could sell their systems significantly cheaper.

Doesitplay has a great article on how Sony is using misleading statistics to say that consumers "chose" digital.

https://www.patreon.com/doesitplay/posts/how-astroturfing-162772857?fbclid=IwY2xjawS0S59leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA80MDk5NjI2MjMwODU2MDkAAR4z69kqsiqnAfP6yb2K2VMDU-20Pm-ZWSTeHhclmw_eMQeOubx0Oy9EtDB3_g_aem_4z_zErDtWiDCOFOemEeJYw

3070 level GPU in console in 2020 would cost arm and a leg. Not only it was the latest nVidia's offering, but nVidia is known for always being quite a bit more costly option. GPU in XSX is around that level (in raster), and it was latest tech from AMD. PS5 draws about the same wattage as 3070, while actually having x86 CPU, which is, due to backward compatibility, developer tools and actual performance, much better option than going with ARM.

As I said, it has nothing to do with how "modern" hardware is - neither Switch's success nor XBOX failing have anything to do with what's inside the box, but rather what those platforms offered.

BraLod already adressed point 2. As for point 1, I never said dumping from physical was the only way. But it is an option even on recent hackable consoles (PS4, PS5 and Switch 1 can dump physical games). In a digital only future, this option disappears, leaving digital dumping as the only option. And the more we lean into a digital future, the more companies will increase the difficulty in which we can dump digital copies. Without physical, as I said, this will make it more difficult to preserve games.

This is the key reason the long term situation for physical media for video games had been looking terrible for a while. For future games it's fully controlled by three companies who are incentivized to push digital and eventually get rid of physical. At this point the best case scenario for physical games is Nintendo sticks with it longer than expected and abandons it in the 2040's instead of next decade. I do expect next decade though so we're looking at a likely world within the next 10 years or so where people will still be able to buy physical media for some modern films and music but for outright zero modern games.

Their own games still have a very decent ratio for physical sales it seems, Sony is risking making their new games and system flop over not having physical media, all the bad press around it and people leaving the ecosystem to somewhere else, it's insane they are going through with it.

They will also lose a lot of money backtracking and showing enough sincerity to get people trust back even if they do, I'll always be untrustful about them for everything from now on, even before 2028.

People looking solely over hard data can't understand how far the damage of their greed can go, and those people making this decisions probably don't care, even if Sony somehow goes under starting from this (not because physical media, because how consumers now see them), they probably just go immediatly destroy other industries for all the short term profit they can squeeze out of it.

For about a decade now the whole world feels like a dystopian movie, every day it's constantly bad news escalating on how bad they can get and people still happily accepting it, even fighting to get more screwed over even, it's really insane how politicians and companies went from having to serve the general public interests and now they expect we to serve them for any bone they can graciously throw our way.

Maybe Sony is shifting from Disc to Game Cartridge, like the PS Vita.

I think that would have been announced by now.