In case you haven’t heard, Sony recently announced that it will stop producing physical game discs come 2028—a move PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon argued continues a trend of consoles turning into little more than worse PCs. But Daniel Ahmad, a videogame market analyst and director of research and insights at Niko Partners, argued in a post on X that we’ve all done this song and dance before (thanks, Gamesradar).
“[It’s] like Apple removing the CD Drive from its laptops starting in 2008,” Ahmad said in the post. “There were definitely a high number of complaints at the time, but not a single person is complaining about it today. You couldn’t find many people complaining in the early 2010s either.”
He does add one apt caveat to this comparison, saying “this time a new laptop will cost $5,000 and my old one with a disc drive works just fine.” Ahmad argued that this was an inevitable outcome for Sony: “If not PS6, then PS7.” Digital sales of full games have come to make up the overwhelming majority of sales for both Playstation and Xbox, therefore “the truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point.”
But he also points out this isn’t just a “market-driven” change, but a “platform-led push by Sony” to squeeze out more money per user—something the company’s leadership has said is a major priority moving forward. Sony makes more on a digital game sale on the console’s bespoke marketplace (in other words, a closed ecosystem further emphasized by the company’s move away from PC ports) than it does on a retail game sale.