Physical Games Still Matter, Even When Nothing Else Feels Real

Sony announced on July 1st that new PlayStation games will stop being produced on discs starting January 2028. Not a slow fade. A date. A cutoff.
After that, if you want a first party PlayStation title, you’re buying a download code, full stop. GTA VI, arguably the most anticipated title of the Ninth Generation, will not be available on disc. All you get is a download code. As physical software sales have depreciated over time, Sony believes that its digital only strategy is a better decision for the PlayStation brand in the long run. While today’s market has been on a digital pivot, there’s something amiss about this stance that will inevitably bite Sony later on. Consumer confidence in the PlayStation platform has only been on a downward trend since this announcement and can ultimately lead to a bigger problem going into the PS6.
For most people, everything you do for work lives in a system you don’t actually own. Everything you post lives on a platform that can change its algorithm overnight that erases six months of content. Games have turned into this same kind of object. Every new game made today for the masses has made it clear that buying the game isn’t just enough. As a matter of fact, these gaming platforms depend on you to stay subscribed to keep playing the games you paid for.
Nowadays your games are tied to an account, sitting on a server owned by a company that can pull the plug whenever the math stops working for them, the way it just did for Sony. When a platform goes down, or a publisher delists a title, the digital copies people paid for just stop existing. No physical equivalent of that exists. A disc can scratch, sure, but nobody can reach into your house and make it disappear because a licensing deal expired.
There’s a reason retro gaming and vinyl and film photography are all having a moment at the same time. It’s not nostalgia for its own sake. It’s a reaction to living inside things you can’t hold. When everything is a subscription, an account, a cloud save, a format that some company can sunset without asking you, an object that just works becomes the whole point. You put the disc in. It plays and you experience something worth your investment. That’s the entire transaction, and there’s something close to relief in how simple that is.
A cartridge or a disc is a receipt for an experience that actually happened to you. You can hand it to someone else, sell it, keep it in a box for twenty years and it still works exactly the way it did the day you bought it. Try doing that with a digital license in 2046. The company might not exist. The store might not exist. The account might be locked because you forgot a password tied to an email you closed years ago.
This isn’t a rant against digital games. Chances are, half of your library is digital. But keep the physical ones on purpose now, the way a photographer keeps negatives instead of just phone photos.
Not because the object is magic. Because it holds ownership in a way that nothing behind a login screen has ever fully managed to be.