Physical Media Dies Quietly
An emergency episode. Sony ends the disc, Xbox goes disc-to-digital, and the only thing left preserving games is the thing they call theft.
A special episode, an emergency one, because something is happening in gaming right now that I could not sit on until the schedule said it was time. Game preservation is losing, and I want to talk about why, what we actually lose, and what, if anything, we can do about it.
The short version: follow the money. The box was always cheap, the games were always the business, and going all digital lets the platform holders keep the entire cut. Sony announced this week that new-game disc production ends in January 2028, the first of the big three to say it out loud, and closed the PS3 and Vita stores in the same breath. The Verge reports the next Xbox drops the disc drive and is testing a disc-to-digital conversion. So I walk through the whole cost: no resale, no lending, nothing to hand down to your kids, and the local and boutique stores that die when the new physical sales dry up. Even physical movies get caught in it, because your console is the last Blu-ray player most people own.
Then the hard part. Games are 200-plus gigs now and there is no cheap format left to save them on. Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation put it flat this weekend: piracy is the only extant form of media preservation that exists in games right now. I know that firsthand. This whole site only exists because a box of Zip disks and floppies survived at my mom’s house. There is one bright spot, US physical spending rose last year for the first time since 2009, on the back of the Switch 2, which proves the demand these companies are walking away from is real.
Read alongside this one: The Subsidy, Part Two is live on the site, and so is The Man Who Called It Ancient, on Jim Ryan and the worldview behind the end of the PlayStation disc.
No bought scores. No filters. Just opinions.
This week’s question: what is the one game on a disc or a cartridge on your shelf that you would hate to only ever own as a download? Tell me why.
- 00:00 What this is, and why it could not wait
- 01:30 Follow the money
- 03:30 The same model, gone digital
- 06:00 What we actually lose
- 09:30 The stores go next
- 12:30 Boutiques and homebrew
- 14:30 The part nobody mentions: movies
- 16:30 Where we stand: Sony, Microsoft, and the PS6
- 20:30 The format problem
- 22:00 You do not own any of it
- 23:30 Piracy is the only preservation left
- 25:00 The archive that survived on Zip disks
- 26:00 It is not over, and what you can do
- 28:00 Where I land, and goodbye