It’s been just over a week since Sony, PlayStation, will announce the death of the physical format for its consoles. Starting in January 2028, no physical games will be released for PlayStation consoles. This is a hard blow for the video game as an art, for preservation and for the consumer, since there are few more anti-consumer measures that make us players depend on a physical format that does not belong to us.
The reaction of these players has not been good and there are those who point to a possible retreat on the part of PlayStation. There is a problem: there is no nail to hold on to other than that of hope.
It makes… sense. From the company’s point of view, the move to 100% digital format is perfect. If you have ever wondered these days what drives them to anger so many players and turn part of their own community against it, it is because, although it may not seem like it, commercially it makes a lot of sense.
Yes, the digital market is enormous and bigger than the physical one, but when statistics are published and it is said that only 20% (approximately) of the market is physical, it is because the digital part includes digital games, games that do not have a physical version, DLC and microtransactions. The ‘FIFA’ envelopes, for example, come into play in those statistics.
That is the argument, but when you seek to eliminate the physical, you seek to control all the gains. You don’t have to make records, you don’t have to transport records, you don’t have to pay stores to sell those records. That margin that you didn’t earn before, with the digital game you start to control. You also get rid of second-hand and lending games, something that companies have been pursuing for years.
Math. And, facing a new generation of consoles that everything indicates will be more expensive than the current one (for example, the price increases for both PS5 as of Xbox Series Xbut also machines like Steam Deck and the more than 1,000 euros from Steam Machine), there Sony may fear that there are users who do not want, or cannot, pay 1,000 euros for a new console. If there are fewer players who buy hardware, there will also be fewer who buy software, but what they are looking for is to maximize profits per user. As? Controlling prices.
An example: on PS5 I buy all the games published by Sony in physical form and for 80 euros. Of those 80 euros, remove 30 that go to those expenses associated with the physical format and the stores themselves. Sony sees 50 euros. With PS6I would buy the same games digitally for 80 euros and Sony would not have any of the expenses associated with either the physical format or payments to stores.
Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier addresses this very well in this video and I was making up the numbers in the previous example, but he points out that, for a $70 first party game, Sony sees about $45. For a $70 first party digital game, Sony sees $70. If we talk about a third party game (Electronic Arts, Ubisoft or whoever publishes for Sony) that is physical, of the 70 dollars, whoever makes the game takes about 35, the store that sells it about 20-25 and Sony takes about 10-15. If that third party game is digital, whoever makes the game gets about 49 and Sony gets about 21. It’s a win-win for both.
Maximize profits. Hideaki Nishino himself, CEO of PlayStation, has made it clear that the company must prioritize performance per client compared to the gross sales volume. They want more average income per user, in short, a model less dependent on selling hardware and more focused on extracting more value from each user. This is where the games themselves come into play, but also microtransactions and subscriptions.
Leave the forum. After days without publishing anything on networks like Bluesky, although they have continued to make announcements on their official blog, Sony remembered the password and announced what no one was expecting: an arcade stick for fighting games. It makes sense because they have a fighting game right around the corner, the ‘Marvel Tokon‘, but the players took that announcement even more harshly.
As a follower of all the fuss, it is almost better that they announced a command in their first communication. The reason? Had they taught the game they would have taught, the amount of negative comments that game would have received would be to study it and, for example, if the first thing is a video of the game of ‘wolverine‘, all the rage these days at PlayStation’s inaction would have been poured out on the game and on a developer studio that does not deserve that treatment.
¿Kicked back? There is, as I said at the beginning, the hope of some users that so much negativity will affect the company’s decision and they will back down. Obviously, no one outside of Sony can know what will happen, but I am not so sure that the company will back down from this decision.
The main reason is that something like this is not taken lightly and reports are already appearing indicating that it is something very studied and they knew perfectly well how part of the community was going to do it. What’s more, there are already reports that indicate that the company’s main Blu-Ray factory, located in Austria, is already beginning the training of some employees who will go on to dedicate themselves to another type of production.
bitter hope. If there is one thing to hold on to, it is that, at the same time that PlayStation announced the death of physical games for its consoles, it also set a date for the closure of the PS3 and PS Vita digital stores (wow timinghuh?), and it wasn’t the first time. In March 2021 we already broke that newsbut the community made itself heard and forced Sony to back down, keeping the stores open indefinitely.
Now comes a new ending, one that seems definitive and that, ironically, was announced just when the statement in which PlayStation set a date for the end of the physical format advocated a measure taken to offer options to the user and so on. It’s also funny that the message was released a few days after the Sony deleted more than 500 digital movies of the libraries of the clients of one of its video services by end of licenses from StudioCanal, showing the volatility of digital content.
In the end, the mathematics that Schreier discusses is there. A digital game is better for whoever makes the game and for the company that has the platform that sells it. They simply do not have to share with anyone else and Nishino’s objective of maximizing profit per software and user is met. That Sony is backing down? Hopefully. Knowing that they will kill the format at some point, as a lover of this I prefer to continue buying physical games for PlayStation for four, six or ten more years before finishing doing so in 2028, even though some of those physical games come completely emptybut that’s another topic.
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