This is one of those things that I kind of always suspected would happen, but hoped it wouldn’t:
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.
I guess I always sort of hoped that physical media would carry on to some degree, even as its importance in the games business declined and aspects of it such as instruction books and posters and other pack-ins have vanished over time.
Come to think of it, physical games are actually kind of a drag now. You get the plastic case, you get the game media, but there’s nothing else. No poster, no instruction book, no registration card, no promo for game magazines. It’s compliance-level stuff; physical for the sake of physical. Ask anyone who is a nerd about vinyl records what it means to open the gatefold and see all the art and pictures of the band in full size. That stuff is still there. If anything, it’s more prominent than ever, because anyone buying records in current year is literally doing it for the love of the format.
My physical media hoarding habit was never about having the biggest collection or the best collection or something that I could monetize on Youtube. At first, it was about permanently solving problems of supply, where copies of a game were hard to come by and expensive on the secondhand market. I always wanted to have the game on the shelf because of the fear that one day I’d want to play that game again but not want to pay whatever the market was asking for it. But then that was solved, either through re-releases or through me having more money.
My focus then turned to games that had personal significance to me or otherwise represented an era in my past. I wanted to be able to pick up anything off the shelf, and go back to what my life was like and what the world was like on the day that game came out.
It’s the only reason any sane person would ever have a boxed copy of The Three Stooges for NES, even though there are obviously other, better totems someone could use to reminisce about 1989 with.
The story of that game was that you were the Stooges, and you had one month to raise as much money as possible to save an orphanage from an evil banker. It’s wild how rich assholes are assholes in any era. 1939, 1989, current day.
Anyways, the game itself was a collection of minigames that you played where the Stooges would take on odd jobs to earn money. It’d be stuff out of the show, like trying to win a boxing match, or eating crackers, or collecting medical supplies at a hospital. The ending you got depended on how much money you earned, with the endings ranging from “Ma barely keeps the orphanage” to “the orphanage gets renovated and the Stooges get married”. I only got the best ending one time. There was nothing particularly satisfying about that event, but it was nice to see what the orphanage looked like fully restored.
There’s a point to wasting half of this post on a nothing-burger of a Nintendo game though, and the point is this: you never think about games like that, or your personal experience with them, if you zip past them in a digital catalog. It’s only when you see the box on the shelf, pick it up and look at it, maybe pull it out of its acrylic protector, and flip through the manual.
Or at least, I don’t.
So I’d hoped I would grow old and retire and die surrounded by hundreds of these stupid little plastic tchotchkes I could use to retrace my steps from the 1980s to my death. Living on different coasts, in different countries, with different friends in and out of my life. All that stuff, chronologically laid out from its 8-bit beginnings in the Reagan era to whatever form this weird cross between art and technology happens to take 30 years down the line, in whatever post-democratic hellscape we all live in.
Instead, this lineage will sort of die at the halfway-mark, with the back half of my life being represented by entries in a digital catalog that nobody, least of all me, will ever see, touch, or hold. And that’s kind of sad.
Maybe I should take up record collecting. Any chance that’ll still be cool in 2050?
