// KOTAKU — GAMING
Killing Discs Could Mean More Expensive Games, And Fewer Discounts: ‘This Move Is All About Profitability And Control’
Physical GamesPhysical MediaPlayStation 6Project Helix
Sony is preparing to wind down and ultimately conclude its manufacturing of physical PlayStation games in 2028, we learned today.
This marks a massive sea change for the games industry, even after years of declining physical sales. Already, the internet is deeply unhappy about it, but the move also opens up a ton of far-reaching questions around which companies will follow suit and how fast, how this will impact pricing and sales, who benefits, and who loses out.
We here at Kotaku have once again scrambled the expert analysts to try to get what answers we can, even as the industry becomes more and more chaotic and unknowable by the day. Here’s what they told us:
With Sony preparing to end physical disc production in 2028, analysts say there will be quite a few knock-on effects beyond just the straightforward “no more physical PlayStation games.”
For one, analysts say the PlayStation 6 and Xbox’s Project Helix are almost certain to launch with no disc drive at all. That will leave players with large libraries of physical games for previous consoles totally unable to play them on the new systems. Daniel Ahmad, director of research and insights at Niko Partners, said that 70 million physical PlayStation games were sold last year, and around 500 million have been sold during the current generation. That’s no small amount. Analysts suggest this could lead Sony to try various methods of helping gamers bring their collections forward, such as an add-on disc drive or some type of disc-to-digital conversion program.
The former of those will almost certainly cost money, and the latter might, too, which is likely going to frustrate PlayStation gamers further. Rumors and reports circulating that the next PlayStation could cost as much as $1,000, combined with its lack of backward compatibility for physical games, might be a dealbreaker for many if Sony can’t find a way to ease the transition.
“I’m hoping they’ll use that extra margin to lower the cost of their devices,” said Joost van Dreunen, NYU Stern professor and author of SuperJoost Playlist. “With a $1,000 console as a new reality, console manufacturers are looking for ways to control costs. Stripping discs improves margins but will likely require greater storage capacity, which is also increasingly expensive.”
As van Dreunen mentions, skipping physical games gives Sony significant extra margin on its software. As things stand now, it’s expensive for companies to make physical games, fewer and fewer people are buying them, and when they do, publishers are making less money off them than they’d like.
Various analysts I spoke to gave me slightly different figures and metrics on this, all pointing to the same conclusion. Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Ampere Analytics, shared data saying that only 13 percent of total full game unit sales were digital when the PS4 launched in 2013. In 2025, that share had rocketed to nearly 80 percent. Ahmad noted that share was 85 percent in Sony’s most recent quarter, and that Xbox digital sales were around the 90 percent mark. James McWhirter at Omdia countered that Sony’s percentage translated to around 200 million physical games sold last year, “a not-insignificant number” that the company certainly hopes to translate into digital sales that it can make more revenue on per copy sold.