PlayStation reportedly wants devs' views on killing discs
A survey said to be one of the biggest Sony has ever sent is quietly sounding out studios on what happens when PlayStation stops making discs — and the industry has already made its feelings clear.
Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has reportedly begun asking developers what they make of a PlayStation without physical discs, with the questionnaire said to be one of the largest the platform holder has ever circulated.
The claim comes from the Moore's Law is Dead channel on YouTube, which reports that the survey is broad enough to stand out. “There is a survey Sony sent out to developers — that is a bigger survey than they've sent almost ever before, if not ever before,” host Tom said, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz and Eurogamer. “And there was a question in it basically trying to ask in a not direct way: is there any issue with how we sell games physically — asking developers for feedback on killing discs.”
Neither Sony nor the studios said to have received it have commented, so treat the survey itself as an industry report rather than a confirmed Sony position. What is confirmed is where this has been heading for the better part of a year.
Sony has already picked a side
Word that PlayStation intended to end disc production, starting in January 2028, broke in July. SIE framed the move as following its own customers. “This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” it said at the time. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
The numbers back the drift. Game File reported that four-fifths of games bought on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in Sony's most recent financial year were bought digitally, a share that has been climbing for a decade. If that figure is the whole story, the disc is already an outlier in Sony's own ledger.
The industry's answer has not been kind
Studios and physical-media specialists met the July plan with unusual candour. Collectors' edition outfit iam8bit told GamesIndustry.biz it was “profoundly disappointed” by the decision, Lost in Cult said it was “deeply saddened”, and PM Studios' Michael Yum called the shift “sad and devastating”.
The frustration is not simply nostalgia for plastic. A disc is the only version of a console game a player can resell, lend, or keep working after a storefront closes. Slipping everything into a download turns a purchase into a licence that lives or dies with Sony's servers, and consumer groups across Europe and North America have spent years pressing regulators on precisely that distinction — what you actually own when you click buy.
There is a blunt commercial question buried in the survey too. If four out of five PlayStation purchases are already digital, Sony may be looking for studios to confirm that nobody will mind, or it may want to hear the objection early, while there is still time to soften the landing.
The direction of travel is industry-wide. Microsoft has already started letting Xbox Insiders claim digital versions of supported physical games, dissolving the boundary from the other side, while both console makers now treat the download as the default build and the disc as the optional extra.
For players the practical losses are easy to list and hard to argue with: no trade-ins, no lending a finished game to a friend, no second-hand market to soften a £70 price, and no guarantee that a title still boots once a storefront has been switched off. Preservationists have been making that argument for years. Sony is about to find out how many other people agree.
Our opinion
Sony is running this survey for cover, not for answers. When digital already accounts for the overwhelming majority of purchases, the disc is a rounding error in a spreadsheet, so the consultation is less about whether physical media ends and more about who carries the blame when it does. Asking developers to say it out loud spreads the responsibility nicely.
That said, the case for keeping discs was never really about shelf appeal. A disc can be swapped, sold and still boot a console years after the store that sold it is gone, and quietly converting every purchase into a licence changes what buying a game means more than any mid-generation hardware refresh. If Sony is confident players have chosen digital, it should publish the survey and let the answer speak for itself. We would read it either way.