Ever since Sony had announced their decision to stop manufacturing discs from 2028, there have been lots of initiatives from players as form of protests against the move which would completely change the face of the industry forever, and the upcoming #PSBlackout on Playstation is another one of those approaches. Gamers on the Sony platform throughout the world have decided to stop all activities related to Playstation such as not switching on their consoles, not playing any games whatsoever and not making any PS-related purchases from August 23 to 30, to make the company aware about the massive amount of dissent regarding their current direction.
Which means during the last week of August, players will try to refrain from playing any games on the Playstation console and perhaps more importantly, not buying anything on the platform either. And to make this agenda public, a profile named ‘Does It Play?’ has shared a message seeking support from like-minded gamers worldwide, aiming for a complete shutdown of the Sony platform starting from August 23 to 30. You can see the complete message below:
However, despite the initiative from a lot of players, it’s unlikely to change anything or see any fruitful results as Sony had clearly estimated and was fully prepared for all of such backlash from gamers as industry-altering decisions like stopping production of discs, are always taken after lots of studies and estimations, both internally and relevant to the overall condition of the worldwide marketplace. So yes, this movement, even if it gets a lot bigger in next month, is not expected to cause any kind of change to the enormous pivot Sony has signaled throughout the entire industry.
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.
