Rockstar Games announced that buyers of the “physical” edition of Grand Theft Auto VI will open their game cases to find a download code.

No disc. A card with a single-use redeemable digital download code and instructions. It is, on its own, an unusual decision for the industry’s most anticipated release in a decade, and one that redefines the future of the gaming industry.

Days later, on July 1 2026, Sony announced that physical disc production for new PlayStation games releasing would end in January 2028.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, the company described the shift as a “natural direction”, explaining it as the consumer preference for digital formats. This blog post attracted thousands of comments within days, with Hideo Kojima describing the news as “really sad”.

This isn’t the first time digital games have been in the spotlight of controversy. Two years earlier, in 2024, Microsoft delisted Forza Horizon 4 from digital storefronts after music licenses expired, but it confirmed that physical copies and previously purchased digital copies would continue to work.

Together, these decisions trace the direction the industry is heading – towards a future where disc games are a rarity, and digital games are the norm.

In January 2024, Ubisoft’s director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, told GamesIndustry.biz that gamers needed to start “feeling comfortable with not owning your game”.

The comment drew immediate backlash. Two months later, his company proved his point, as on March 31 2024, Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew, a racing game released in 2014, and sold to players as a one-time purchase.

The game required an online connection to run, and so, when the servers were shut down, so did the game. Even though The Crew had a 20-hour story solo campaign, explorable map and challenges against AI, the game still forced a connection to a server to play alone.

Days after the shutdown, Ubisoft began revoking players’ licenses entirely, their refuwsal of refunds causing a class action lawsuit filing in California. Ubisoft’s lawyers argued that purchasing the game granted “no unfettered ownership rights”.

This is the largest distinction between physical and digital games. When a player purchases a game or other digital media, they are typically buying a licence to access it rather than owning it outright. Under the terms of that licence, access can be revoked, altered or terminated, as set out in the user agreement accepted at the point of purchase.

This fine print had existed since the earliest days of digital storefronts. However, The Crew finally drew attention to it, bringing the industry’s overlooked fine print into the public eye. Later that year, Valve added a notice to every Steam checkout page confirming that customers are purchasing a license, not a product.

The second concern with digital games is that they cannot be archived. Delisted games do not enter public archives meaning once developers shut down the game, a part of history is lost.

We’ve seen this before in older Nintendo eShops. On January 30, 2019, Nintendo closed the Wii Shop Channel, a storefront that had been operating for 12 years and sold a wide variety of digital-only games.

Players who had already purchased games could continue to redownload them after the eShop closed. However, Nintendo made it clear that this grace period was temporary and would eventually come to an end.

This same fate came for the DS, 3DS and Wii U Shops, essentially destroying gaming history. Preservation of these titles has been entirely through fan-based archives, which are technically illegal, but they do what the publishers could not do. 

Forza Horizon 4 proves the importance of preserving physical access to games. The physical disc from 2018 still plays while the digital only game is not available for purchase anymore (delisted).

From a commercial standpoint, the logic to kill discs is sound.

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreir, reporting on Sony’s internal calculation, laid out the maths. On a $70 first-party PlayStation game, Sony pays roughly a 30% retailer margin and around $3.50 per disc to manufacturers. That leaves the company with around $45.50 per physical sale. On a digital sale, it keeps the full $70.

So, the incentive to kill discs is not just about consumer preference but about profit margins as well. Without used-games markets to compete against, publishers will set the price of older titles indefinitely, as their worth cannot depreciate from second hand purchases.

This movement from discs has come with great resistance from the community.

In April 2024, days after Ubisoft shut down The Crew, a campaign called ” Stop Killing Games ” was launched, arguing that publishers should not be permitted to render purchased games unplayable. By 2026, the campaign had gathered over 1.29 million signatures in Europe and 189,000 in the UK. 

Publishers’ move to digitalisation affects more than just video games. This issue is universal to all digital products.

For example, in 2009, Amazon remotely removed George Orwell’s 1984 from users’ Kindles following a licensing dispute. Adobe has similarly abandoned perpetual licences in favour of subscription-only software, while films purchased through digital storefronts have disappeared as licensing agreements have expired.

The physical disc remains one of the last formats that most people can point to and say, with certainty, they truly own.

The disc was an object. It could be held, lent, sold and resold, displayed, archived and even broken. It was yours, not a contract or a license.

When Sony stops production in 2028, discs will begin their death cycle. What replaces them is a purchase for permission to play a game – a licence that can be altered, revoked or simply disappear.

Image credit: Unsplash (edited by Ali Shaker)