I said last week that if they don't reverse this decision by this Friday then they're most likely not backing down. If they do backtrack at any point I would be more shocked if they did than didn't. Their financials are coming up in a few weeks where I'm sure they have to say something, and I think that is when we will know if they're continuing with their plans.

I honestly thought Xbox would be the first to cut off physical altogether, as they've been reducing it for years now.

For Sony, I figured they'd go all digital with the PS6 but continue making discs til they phase out PS5, basically ending on a generational line. Turns out they're not even waiting that long.

Will be interesting (and possibly depressing) to see if the backlash actually hits their bottom line or if 95% of players just go along with it.

'in a statement about consumer preferences' and 'Sony's 2025 financials statement' are two different things. 

You were very clearly referencing the public statement they put out which told us nothing about how they were tracking digital consumer preferences, and now you're talking about Sony's financials, which we all already know includes all digital sales. Again, there is nothing unusual about this - it's a financial report. 

You could argue Sony's public statement is perhaps stretching the claim about digital preference for consumers. But data to support this exists in multiple forms, such as retailers have less shelf space for physical games or Capcom's financial statements (which you have tried to hand wave because it doesn't fit your narrative). 

If you disagree with Sony on about consumer preferences for digital, then prove it.

It's going to be a steep mountain to climb to convince their parent company to reverse their $30 million investment into the factory to move to microlenses. Even if PlayStation reversed their decision, they're still need to find someone to manufacture those discs. And since it wouldn't be at a Sony factory anymore, quite likely it costs them more to produce. 

Best we can hope for is better digital content management / rights. But we got 18 +- months to see that happen. 

It's a bummer. I would rather not see physical games disappear. More choices is always better.

Lol, I’m now seeing people saying “you don’t actually own physical games, either, you can’t just do whatever you want with the disc, it’s merely a license as well, read the EULAs!” No fucking shit, we know we don’t own the software, you can’t (legally) go making (multiple) copies of games you buy on disc or uploading them online, we all know that, but the physical copies are 100% mine and if somebody walks into my house and snags them off my shelf, I’ve got news for you, buddy, that’s theft.

Digital copies OTOH can be snagged from you at any time for any reason (just ask all the people who bought those 550 movies deleted off the PlayStation Store), so you don’t even own digital copies of games. It’s not hard. And really, that’s what people are upset about losing in an all-digital world (besides buying power), also not hard. That’s also what the “if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing” people/memes are ripping at.

TL;DR: the “if you can’t touch it, you don’t own it” thing is 100% true and this “you never owned physical games” stuff isn’t the gotcha these “well, akshully” people think it is.

Even with a petition thats been signed by 250k gamers, i know sony won't back down,that guy from digital foundry said it the best,they just dont care about gamers anymore.

Soo only thing we can do is try and hurt them where it matters,dont buy any more digital games,noo ps plus, noo consoles and deff noo ps6!keep supporting physical!

The source for their 85% of gamers preferring physical was the Q4 2025 financials. The number for all of 2025 was 78%. They cherry-picked the lowest financial report on purpose. Do you seriously beleive they weren't referencing the Q4 report? Or did you have another document or financial report that exactly matches their 85% claim?

Retailers having less shelf space isn't proof that consumers prefer digital massively. It's proof that retailers and Xbox/Sony DON"T want physical to be readily available. Retailers want to sell physical games but ONLY have enough stock to just barely meet a little under demand. That way they sellout completely. But then this reduces the availability of physical games which pushes more people to digital. Also, do you even have the hard data for shelf space? Did you count all the shelf space and see how much it fell by? Do you have proof that it has steadily fallen at a continuous pace and hasn't hit a brick wall of minimum stock? Remember that 30% of gamers will always buy physical and even more so on the Nintendo side which sits at 44%. There's a core set of gamers that are primarily physical. Physical sales will drop but once they hit that core set of physical buyers it will not drop much further. Or at least that's my claim I'm going to make. Perhaps that theory will get tested or perhaps all companies will just greedily go all-digital before we can see physical sales drop below 30% for games that have both a physical copy and digital copy. 

I'm not hand waving Capcom's numbers. I'm explaining them logically and showing why they are an outlier. z

"If you disagree with Sony on about consumer preferences for digital, then prove it."

Magical fairies exist. If you disagree with me on that then prove it! I don't have to prove anything. Sony made the BS claim. Poking holes in it is enough. Also, please write a letter to Sony on my behalf so they can give me every ounce of their sales data and I'll dive right in. In a court of law this is called discovery. Both lawyers are allowed all evidence and materials that the other lawyer has. Asking me to disprove Sony's claim without having access to all the evidence and material they have is ridiculous. It should be bad enough that people can easily poke holes in their BS with the scant information they give us. And yeah, there's the Insomniac leak and some other market research that supports physical still being prefered by 30% to 40% of PS gamers. But you want absolute proof and I can't deliver that without all the info Sony has. 

Yeah with the death of physical media, likely a generation-long crossgen period, and likely a $1000 (or thereabouts) price tag, it's looking like PS5 may be my last playstation.

But hey, the good news is, there are still dozens, possibly hundreds of quality PS4/5 games I haven't played yet, so I'll still be playing PS for many years yet.

I'd just like to point out that Playstatin's MAU averages 123 million over 2024 and 2025, per Sony's financial reports. There's 92 million PS5's currently. Even if we assume that 100% of PS5's out there have an active user and aren't sitting in a pawn shop we still have 31 million PS4 users at minimum to account for. And if those 31 million PS4 users are still buying even one game a year that game is almost certainly going to be digital on Sony's spreadsheets because Sony can't track second-hand sales. So that's 31 million sales at minimum per year that are forced digital sales. Assuming that your average PS5 owner buys 4 games per year (One more than the standard industry claim, just so I can give digital an unfair legup. I like to work from a handicap.) then we have 368 million games sold per year for PS5. Now let's add in the 31 million games sold digitally on PS4. Well it's easy to see from the get go that 8%-10% of these "digital sales" are just people buying PS4 games digitally because new PS4 games are out of print and Sony can't track second-hand sales.

So it's easy to see that if you take the 78% digital average from Sony's 2025 reports and subtract even 8% from the PS4 numbers that I worked out above, we have 70% average digital sales ratio for PS5 alone. Now account for indies and other digital-only games. This should all be intuitive by the way. I shouldn't have to spell it out for anyone.

Feel exactly the same.