Sony is leaving physical games behind in 2028

Sony had a double-whammy of press releases yesterday. First, they announced that they were ditching physical game discs in 2028:

As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028.

And they also announced that they will be closing the PS3 and Vita digital storefronts over the next year:

As the PlayStation Store continues to evolve to support modern commerce systems, including updated payment processing standards, PS3 and PS Vita are no longer able to support these updates at the level required. As a result, we will need to close PlayStation Store on these devices in the timeframes as follows:

As you might expect, people are not thrilled about these announcements. As Andrew Webster wrote on The Verge, this is not good for game preservation, as once these stores go away, there is no way for new players to get these older games. In the case of the PS3 and Vita, there were physical games released for those platforms, so even after these stores close, people will be able to find and buy these games used on places like eBay. However, in an all-digital world, that goes away.

I'm personally not super upset about this, although I also wouldn't argue this is good news either. So let me just rattle through my thoughts on this.

I can't help but wonder how many physical games the people who are vocally upset about this today actually buy. I know there are still people who buy physical games, but the numbers are pretty astronomical that the vast majority of people buy digital games and have been doing so for a decade.

A fundamental reality of storefronts is that they need to get updated with things like security updates. The PS3 launched 20 years ago, and the standards for payment security have leveled up considerably since then. This is actually a problem you run into on old computers that haven't been updated to modern TLS standards. As an example, I have an old iMac from around the same era that's really cool and can run local apps just fine, but when you open the web browser, most websites won't load because the browser is so out of date it can't support modern security standards.

It's worth noting that Sony is not removing the ability to download games you've previously purchased on a PS3 or Vita, so if you want to go back to those games, you can still do that. Presumably that will go away eventually one day as well, though.

The game preservation angle comes up quite a bit, and I get it to an extent. Although I have to wonder if we had all the data, would we see that more people played PS3 and Vita games for the first time over the last year by buying them from PS3 and Vita devices, or by emulating them on PCs? I think there's a very good chance that it's the latter, and I think there's a very good chance it's by several orders of magnitude. I'm all for game preservation and making sure people have easy access to old games, but I'm not sure that closing 20 year old stores and going fully digital kills this.

I've previously written about my joy I felt by taking old video game cartridges, popping them in new hardware, and having them just work. We've kind of lost that at a fundamental level with console video games for quite a while now. And a move to all digital just makes this even more at the default state.

One of the things that's hurt when abandoning physical games is affordability. I'm not even talking about those moments when the physical copy can be gotten for cheaper than the digital one. I'm talking about things like sharing a game with friends, something that's especially common amongst younger people. There's also the ability to resell a game, which completely disappears when going digital. I'm lucky enough to be able to buy the games I want to play without worrying too much about this, but that's not the case for everyone, and losing that ability to offset your gaming costs is a real concern for many people and I don't want to discount it.

The timing of this announcement isn't ideal, considering just a few days previous Sony announced that they were actually removing hundreds of movies from the libraries of people who had previously bought them. This is actually worse than what Sony's doing with the game stores, and I think this is the fear people have will happen for games they've previously purchased digitally. One day they just won't be able to play them anymore because they didn't technically own them, they just had licenses that could be revoked at any point for any reason.

At the end of the day, Sony is taking something away that consumers used to have, and there's no way to spin that in a way that will make people happy. Nor should they be, to be clear! I'm certainly not cheering this news, but at the same time, in a world full of things to be outraged about, I feel like this deserves about a 4 on the outrage scale. If anything, it furthers my belief in the power and importance of emulation and why it's such a core piece of art preservation in this medium.