A petition demanding Sony reverse its controversial PS5 disc decision has surpassed 350,000 signatures following a new update from PlayStation. Back on July 1, Sony announced its plan to stop making physical game discs in 2028. It made this contentious announcement well before the PS6, clearly aware of the blowback it would get, which it would not associate with its new console that will no doubt continue this all-digital trend. If this was the call, it was a good call because the blowback has been substantial. In fact, this has been the biggest PR debacle for Sony since the great PSN outage of 2011.
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Until July 31, Sony pretended like this blowback didn’t exist, even as announcements of protests reached millions. What happened on July 31 is that Sony finally acknowledged the many angry PlayStation fans, noting it was not preparing to budge and was rather preparing to “cautiously move forward.” This was as much a message for investors and partners as it was for fans. Since then, there has been another surge of signatures for the aforementioned petition.
A Lot of Angry PlayStation Fans
It’s not easy to get someone to go out of their way and sign an online petition, yet the aforementioned petition — Don’t Kill the Disc: Tell Sony to Keep Physical PlayStation Games — is 150 signatures away from 355,000.
The goal of the petition is obviously to get Sony to keep disc-based games alive beyond 2028. Unfortunately, unless this petition blows up in an unexpected way, it looks like Sony is prepared to ignore it. If Sony was going to budge, it would have been early and before any commitment was made in a follow-up. Now that Sony has doubled down, the chances of the decision being reversed are close to zero. It’s budged in the past and reversed contentious decisions, but not after doubling down, and doing so in a very definitive fashion.
As for why Sony is doing this, it’s because of money. Producing physical discs isn’t expensive. Sony actually makes money from others using its Blu-ray discs. What’s costly to its bottom line are the cuts retailers take from physical game sales — these cuts don’t exist digitally — and the second-hand market. There are other reasons too. The PS5 was notably jailbroken using a physical PS5 game. So there are security elements to consider. And there’s also the simple fact that it’s a small part of PlayStation’s business, and one it sees only getting smaller. Why Sony couldn’t have evolved the business into a more boutique business, we do not know, but in the age where video game development costs are skyrocketing and it’s losing money on console hardware, saving money wherever it can is a must.
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