At the very start of the month, PlayStation announced that there will be no more discs for games releasing from 2028 onwards. Which means that unless a new medium is released, “physical” games will be codes in boxes. More recently a message sent to developers and publishers via a private developer portal looks to be confirming this. It also confirms that once 2028 rolls around, devs and publishers can still release discs, but only for games released before that.
VGC cites a Game File report which notes that PlayStation has told partners that it will “provide publishers with the opportunity to release new games at retail using digital codes”. Which is pretty much what is expected anyway, as it’s by no means a new method of retail distribution while being “physical” in the bare minimum sense of the word. More details are reportedly to come, though it’s unclear what further details are even necessary at this point.
As part of the report, PlayStation has confirmed the caveat that games that have already been released on disc will not be affected by the 2028 digital only transition. Of course, the key phrase here is “games that have already been released”. So by the time we get to 2028, only older games will be available as discs. The Sony videogames subsidiary says that publishers “will still be able to place re-orders” for existing games until then, though the process itself will change in some way. Details on those are still to be announced.
Of course, this has been a move that’s long in the making. A recent report indicated that Sony has already begun converting its disc-making plant in Austria to be producing microlenses instead. This plant makes up to 600,000 discs a day, half of them being for PlayStation. That number is expected to go down to 10% in 2028, fulfilling the aforementioned re-orders.
