Last week, Sony announced that they will be shutting down the production of discs from January 2028, basically marking the end of physical media as we know it and needless to say, sending shockwaves through the industry that will continue to be felt for months to come. The announcement took the entire gaming community by storm and has resulted in multiple social media campaigns, boycotts along with a new petition that has gained an incredible momentum in only four days, signalling the sheer disappointment, anger and sadness of players across the world.
The petition which is titled ‘Don’t kill the Disc’ has garnered a total of 100,000 signatures so far, and was kickstarted by a representative of a Canadian retail platform named PnP Games on Change.org. The bio of the petition states the following:
“A disc is a real game you own. You can lend it, trade it, resell it, gift it, collect it, or pass it down to your kids. A box with only a download code is not the same thing. It is a digital license in plastic packaging. You do not own it. You are renting access that can be revoked, and people have already had purchased movies deleted from their libraries and games pulled from sale weeks after launch.”
Even though it’s unlikely that Sony will back off from making such a seismic and industry-wide pivot, it’ll be interesting nonetheless to see how they respond to the growing numbers of the online petition.
One of the problems of the complete loss of physical media is that it’ll give players far less control over their owned videogames and can essentially remove all sense of ownership and rights which in turn leaves all of that in the hands of the publishers. This also takes away all sense of freedom of playing that gamers have towards their owned copies which is damning in more ways than one, making the industry move one step closer to a centralized, authoritarian model where huge corporations have all the control while the players have almost none.
