"Don't Kill the Disc" petition against Sony passes 300,000 signatures

On July 1, Sony announced on the PlayStation Blog that it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. Three weeks later, the "Don't Kill the Disc" petition on Change.org passed 300,000 signatures and is still climbing. Sony calls this a natural direction for the market. The company's own numbers point to something simpler: a disc sale leaves Sony with 65 percent of the revenue, a digital sale keeps the full 100.

What's actually ending, and what isn't

The change only applies to new titles released after January 2028. Games already on the market won't disappear from shelves in boxed form, and PlayStation consoles will keep reading discs that already exist. Sid Shuman, Sony Interactive Entertainment's senior director of content communications, described the move as aligning with how most of the PlayStation community already buys games, citing one financial quarter in which digital sales hit 85 percent of the total.

The problem is that's one quarter's result, not a fixed rule, and the longer-term trend, while real, is milder: digital's share of full-game sales on Sony consoles climbed from roughly 13 percent in 2013 to nearly 80 percent by 2025, according to Ampere Analysis. Sony picked the number for its announcement that made the strongest case.

The real reason isn't where Sony puts it

A game sold digitally goes to Sony in full, with no cut for distributors, disc manufacturers, or brick-and-mortar retailers. A game sold on disc leaves the company with about 65 percent of that amount. At PlayStation's sales volume, that gap adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and that, not the stated "alignment with player preferences," explains both the timing and the firmness of this decision.

Serkan Toto, CEO of the analyst firm Kantan Games, told IGN bluntly that Sony almost certainly anticipated this backlash and simply plans to wait out the storm. Nothing about the company's response to 300,000 petition signatures contradicts that: no change of plans, no official concession, just silence following the single July 1 statement.

Why this is more than nostalgia for a box on a shelf

The petition's organizers, led by independent Canadian retailer PNP Games, aren't only fighting for sentiment. A disc-based game keeps working even after a publisher pulls it from a digital store: Microsoft recently delisted Forza Horizon 4 from the Xbox Store, but owners of the physical disc can still install and play it on Xbox One or Xbox Series consoles. A digital-only game whose license gets revoked simply stops existing for the player, no matter what they paid for it.

Developer Hideo Kojima made a similar warning around his own game Positron, saying players wouldn't own the data, only license temporary access to it. That warning maps onto Sony's situation almost exactly. The UK's Entertainment Retailers Association added hard numbers to the argument: 25 percent of players under 25 still buy discs, and the UK's physical games market topped £300 million in 2025. ERA called Sony's decision "a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice."

Xbox is heading the same direction, just more quietly

Sony isn't acting in a vacuum. Xbox Series S never had a disc drive, an all-digital version of the Series X already exists, and reports about the next Xbox generation, referred to internally as Project Helix, suggest it may drop the optical drive entirely. Microsoft is simultaneously testing a feature to convert older Xbox One and Series discs into digital copies, though without support for Xbox 360 or original Xbox discs.

It's worth remembering Microsoft already got burned by a similar idea once. At the Xbox One reveal in 2013, the company pitched a digital library concept tied to a user's account, one that could still be resold or lent to friends. Player backlash was fierce enough that Microsoft scrapped the plan before the console even launched. Thirteen years later, the industry is trying the exact same thing again, just in quieter, more spread-out steps.

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