Sony should listen to its customers on physical media, even if it won't

Sony has a straightforward path to showing some good faith to its most loyal hardware buyers, even if the company will almost certainly never take it. Back on July 1, 2026, Sony announced that it will stop pressing physical discs for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. Meanwhile, earlier in October, unpaid coders in the homebrew scene released updates to PS5 emulators that read and rip physical PS2 and PS3 discs straight from the console's internal drive.

Watching hobbyists turn the PS5's optical drive into a multi-generational disc player makes Sony's rush to kill off plastic media look like a self-inflicted wound. The homebrew implementation is still early, as shown in test footage from earlier this month, but it already works well and shows real promise.

35% of your audience is a lot of people to annoy

Sony is holding strong to its 2028 cutoff date, even though the numbers the company cited to justify abandoning discs don't make sense when you look at what people actually buy. In mid-October, sales data showed that physical copies made up 51% of Marvel's Wolverine sales in Europe and 35% worldwide. A large portion of the Switch 2's game sales are physical, too. Yes, the majority of customers globally prefer digital downloads now. Nobody is arguing otherwise, yet 30% to 35% is not a small number of customers to alienate, and collectors hold a grudge really well.

The only conclusion I can make is that Sony simply doesn't want to press discs anymore. Without discs, we are forced to buy exclusively from Sony's own marketplace, with no retail competition and no used games.

I love many Sony brands. God of War, Astro Bot, and exclusives like Ratchet & Clank and Infamous are all fantastic, and I want to play them. If a digital download is the only way to get them, though, I'm fine missing them. Between Steam and Nintendo, I already own more games than I'll ever be able to finish, and if I'm forced to choose between two digital stores, I'm going to choose Steam.

Sell me a $110 patched disc a year later

Instead of shutting the door on physical media, Sony could still choose to embrace the customers who want to own their libraries. They should take a few hints from the emulation community and build their own official PS2 and PS3 disc emulators right into the PS5 OS. PS1 discs won't work in the PS5's internal drive because modern Blu-ray mechanisms don't have an infrared laser that works with standard CDs. So just let us plug in an external USB CD drive that does. Why not?

We have already seen how a restricted approach plays out with Xbox's backward compatibility for original Xbox and Xbox 360 games on modern consoles. Microsoft claimed most people didn't use the feature and eventually stopped adding to it, yet many players skipped it simply because Xbox only supported a specific list of games. Had they built a catch-all emulator that would load any disc you inserted, it would have seen a much wider adoption rate. Even so, Xbox's new disc-to-digital licensing feature is a cool step forward. At least they are trying.

As for new games, we don't even need physical copies for day-one releases. In fact, day-one discs almost don't make sense anymore because you'll need to download massive patches right out of the box anyway. Wait a few months to a year after launch, then release physical editions that include all the patches and some DLC on the disc.

Charge $100 to $110 for them. Idiots like me will gladly pay. Hell, I might even double dip if it's a game that I want on day one.

Offering official backward-compatible disc playback and complete, late-run physical editions would be an easy way for Sony to earn back a ton of goodwill while making a healthy profit margin on the side. Had they already offered this, the chances of a modern hacker spending the time to crack a PS5 would have greatly decreased. Sony could still pivot before January 2028 arrives, though I wouldn't bet a single scratched DVD on them actually listening.