By Nelson Schneider - 07/05/26 at 02:30 PM CT
Just a few weeks ago, we learned that – against all better judgment – we are, indeed, set to be subjected to another Generation of Console Wars. However, it seems that Sony is trying to sabotage its 10th Gen efforts before they can even get off the ground.
As if the PlayStation company delving into the evils of Dynamic Pricing wasn’t bad enough, they’ve recently announced that, starting in 2028, there will be NO MORE PHYSICAL PLAYSTATION GAME DISCS... EVER! 2028 seems to be a reasonably-distant point in time to consider the release of the unfortunately-planned PlayStation 6, so this announcement is an obvious declaration that the PS6 will not have a disc drive, and that any cross-gen games released after the launch window of Sony’s 10th Gen console will only be available as digital downloads, even if you own a PS5 with a disc drive or a PS5 Pro with an external disc drive.
Why would Sony make such a horrible decision? After all, the awful experience of the PlayStation Store and DRM on the PlayStation 3 is what drove me away from consoles in the 7th Gen. According to Sony’s internal bean-counting bullshitters (or bullshitting bean-counters), north of 80% of all of Sony’s game sales are now digital. Of course, this is highly skewed data (more of Mark Twain’s “lies, damned lies, and statistics”), which fails to take into account that most of these so-called “digital sales” are actually Freemium games stuffed to the gills with microtransactions – namely “Fortnite,” “Call of Duty: Warzone,” and “Roblox.” Of the premium first-party games that Sony seems to pride itself on, the split between digital and physical sales is a much more rational 50/50.
As if the news of PlayStation turning into a digital dictatorship wasn’t bad enough, it follows on the heels of other horrible news about Sony hardware: Bravia TVs will no longer be made by Sony itself, but will be outsourced to TCL. I have been a huge fan of Sony Bravia televisions as gaming screens for nearly 2 decades at this point, and find this news devastating. I also have a TCL TV, and it’s not nearly as good as a Bravia in any way, shape, or form, ranging from picture quality to audio quality to smart features to UI. Sony’s willingness to shut-down digital services to their Bravias – things like TV guide data and smart TV features – has always been galling, but the overwhelming quality of Bravia hardware has made it worth suffering through.
Of course, now that PlayStation is going to be entirely digital, everyone who still games on the platform will get to enjoy Sony’s insanely-short End of Life windows for their digital products and services. Sony also just revoked – not delisted, actually revoked and REMOVED from the customers’ libraries – a significant number of digital movies, so it doesn’t take a particularly active imagination to predict that this same kind of license revocation will come to PlayStation games sooner rather than later.
Why is Sony doing this? Some Industry insiders have stated the obvious: It’s all about control. If Sony doesn’t have to support physical media and the PlayStation Network Store is the sole source for media that can be played on a PlayStation, they don’t have to compete with anyone but themselves. No third-party keytailers, no physical discount bins, no Gamestop. And, honestly, a Walled Garden where the walls are so high that the prisoners trapped within it aren’t even aware that anything “outside” the garden even exists is the only way to make Dynamic Pricing actually work.
It is truly disgusting that Capitalists are more and more frequently going out of their way to remove the important mechanics that make Capitalism work as an economic system in favor of rigged gambling, insurance rackets, monopolies, collusion, and rent-seeking. It truly is past the time for these corrupt industries to collapse and undergo a reset.
