Sony deciding to stop productions of discs altogether from 2028 which could lead to a complete demise of all physical media is the single biggest news of this year that could easily have industry-altering ramifications throughout the coming months and years. However, not all of those consequences have to be negative and there can be even a few unexpected upsides to Sony’s pivot from physical media, according to Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot.
Speaking during the company’s most recent investor Q&A yesterday, Guillemot’s response to an analyst on the possible impact of Sony’s seismic announcement regarding the future of discs, was a bit surprising as he had stated the following:
“What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market,” Guillemot said. “There’s also some pressure for the future on the cost of machines and being able to be only digital will help to have a more accessible machine, I would say.”
“There are plus and minus,” the Ubisoft CEO concluded, “but we think it will not disturb too much the industry.”
While he certainly has a valid point that most players in the recent few years have come to prefer digital versions of videogames than physical so it’s unlikely that Sony’s pivot could actually change a lot of what we already see in most of the players’ libraries. However, what’s actually saddening is the end of a long era of physical media, which were an embodiment of many gamers’ emotion for their favorite hobby as well as a symbol of ownership which will be sorely and dishearteningly missed as gaming continues to evolve throughout the next few years and beyond.
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.
