Well damn, this is disappointing news. On July 1, 2026, Sony announced that they will be ending production of physical PlayStation game discs in January 2028. Citing “consumer preferences” and the entertainment industry’s “shift away from physical discs to digital”, they will be ending disc production for “all new games” being released on PlayStation consoles. Uffda…this one hurts, man….

Previously on this website, I have expressed my preference for physical media and my growing unease with the precarity of digital ownership (see this article and this one too),so it’s fairly obvious where I land on this topic. And sure, if you look at my own collection of games, I have purchased my fair share of digital game copies. But even if the end of physical game discs was an eventuality, Sony putting a date on it still makes me sad.

Acknowledging that my own collection of PlayStation games went almost entirely digital as of the PS4 era, I understand where Sony is coming from with this decision. However, I still want to have the option of playing physical game discs on my Sony console. Not just because some of my favorite PS4 memories involve playing game discs—Ghost of Tsushima was gifted to me by a friend, after all—but also because I strongly associate the PlayStation brand with disc-based media. And not just games either!

With the original PlayStation you could play not only PS1 games, but also audio CDs. And yeah, dumb it might sound today, I definitely listened to many a music CD on my PlayStation. Then with PlayStation 2, the fact that the console could play DVDs was just a total gamechanger. For thousands of households across the country, mine included, the PS2 was the first DVD player we ever owned. It wasn’t until the PS2 era that I even considered buying DVDs, but it’s 2026 and I’m still buying them today.

The PS3 played both regular DVDs and Blu-rays, and thus it became our house’s movie playing device when we got one. The same thing happened with PS4, which I continue to use as my Blu-ray/DVD player to this day. In fact I just watched a couple Street Fighter movies on it recently and have more Street Fighter movies yet to re-watch on it. All that to say, while the PlayStation is primarily a video game console, it has always been my preferred way to watch movies on physical media as well.

This feels like yet another sign of how the Video Game Industry is slowly imploding. Although, maybe that’s a misnomer; arguably there is no one monolithic video game “industry” to declare the decline of. However, this feels like a bad omen for console players. Without physical distribution, PS consoles lose one of the last remaining attributes that distinguish it from PC gaming. There are scant few reasons to buy a PS5 or XBOX if you already have a PC, and eliminating game discs removes one of them.

At present, I still haven’t pulled the trigger on buying a PS5 myself—and with the way the console’s price continues to climb, perhaps I’ll never get one—but I would absolutely pay more to have a disc drive. In my opinion, a Playstation without discs is not a real PlayStation. But with Sony’s disappointing announcement, it seems that particular aspect of the Sony media experience will soon be dead.