Sony's Disc-Free Future (Part 3): They Are Conditioning Loyal Customers

Sony's Trying to Break Its Loyal Customers In Like Horses

I'll be straight with you — I went into Sony's disc-less announcement with a pretty soft heart. I'd already gone mostly digital myself, and honestly, a shelf of aging game discs had started feeling less like a collection and more like a chore. Watching streaming take down CDs and DVDs, I figured this was just where the road was always headed, and Sony was just the one driving there first.

Then I sat down with some buddies who run retail shops, and that heart got a hard shake.

What if the whole premise Sony's leaning on is just plain wrong?

Quick take

Sony says 85% of its game sales are digital. That number bundles in free-to-play, DLC, PS Plus freebies, and digital-only indies. Leaked internal documents show Sony's actual flagship titles — Uncharted 4, Spider-Man, The Last of Us Part II — still sell mostly on disc. And back home, used-game stores are opening, not closing.

The number Sony's hanging this decision on — "85% of game sales are already digital" — the more I turn it over, the less it looks like an honest snapshot of where the market's headed, and the more it looks like a number somebody polished up to steer public opinion right where they wanted it. So unlike the first two pieces I wrote on this, this one isn't going to play nice. This is the piece where I say what I actually suspect.

What That Number's Really Made Of

Let's follow the money and see where that number came from. Sony's claim — about 85% digital for the quarter ending this past March — has been getting passed around by press and investors alike like it's gospel, no questions asked, as proof that "physical media is officially dead."

Here's the thing nobody's saying out loud: that 85% has a whole lot of stuff stuffed into it that never touched a disc to begin with. Free-to-play titles, in-game microtransactions, DLC, PS Plus subscription games, and indie titles that launched digital-only from day one. Throw all that into the numerator and denominator and call it "85% digital," and you've basically built a brand-new suburb with no video rental store in it, then announced "video rental culture is dead." Technically not a lie. But it doesn't answer the only question that actually matters: are people still buying the big, disc-eligible titles on disc?

What the Leaked Files Actually Show

Alright, let's back this up with something you can put your hand on. The Insomniac Games hack leaked internal documents covering real sales numbers for 33 of Sony's major first-party titles. Thirty-one of those thirty-three sold more copies on disc than digital.

Put some numbers to it. Uncharted 4 — 83% physical. Sackboy and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — over 75%. Spider-Man and The Last of Us Part II — in the 60s. The only place digital genuinely dominated was in the live-service, grind-it-every-day titles, like MLB The Show.

Bottom line: the exact games Sony cares most about selling — the big, story-driven, single-player heavy hitters — are the ones still moving on disc. But the company's walking around waving an average that's got F2P and DLC mixed in with everything else, telling us disc is a niche hobby now.

Then Why's There Still a Game Shop on Every Corner?

Forget the number-crunching for a second — look at what's actually happening on the ground. Take the UK, about as mature and central a console market as you'll find, practically in Sony's own backyard. GAME, the big new-release chain, basically vanished from British high streets in early 2024 when it stopped buying and selling used copies altogether. But CeX — the country's dominant secondhand chain, pushing 400 UK stores and over 600 worldwide across a dozen countries — isn't retreating. It's specializing. As of this August, CeX is reportedly opening its first-ever stores dedicated entirely to retro and import games, timed right alongside the backlash over Sony's own disc cutoff. New-release retail dies out, and the secondhand guy opens a store just for old cartridges. That's not the footprint of a company betting physical is dead.

Japan's telling a similar story. GEO, one of the country's biggest secondhand chains, just brought retro game buybacks back at 920 stores nationwide this past December, with retail sales of those same games rolling out at more locations through early 2026 — and they're framing it as riding a worldwide retro-game boom, not fighting one. Their own customer survey found 72.8% of people who'd bought anything secondhand recently did it at a physical store. Highest that number's ever been.

In Korea, it's the same story on a smaller scale — a chain that started out of a cramped little office in Yongsan has grown to 78 storefronts nationwide as of 2024. Korea's a late arrival to console gaming generally, so I won't lean on it too hard here, but it's one more data point pointing the same direction.

Now, the US complicates the picture some, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. GameStop's been closing stores hand over fist — down from nearly 2,900 locations in early 2024 to under 1,600 by this January, with US physical game spending hitting an all-time low in 2025. But pull back GameStop's own numbers and it's a funkier story than "digital killed it": software, physical and digital combined, has shrunk to about a fifth of what the company sells now, while collectibles — figures, cards, that whole aisle — have exploded to nearly a third of revenue. That's not a company where physical retail evaporated. That's a company that moved its physical retail into a different aisle. And as of this September, GameStop's actually started reopening a handful of the very stores it shut down.

So the pattern holds in three out of four markets I looked at, including the one right in Sony's own front yard. The one that's genuinely struggling is struggling for reasons a lot messier than "85% of everybody went digital." If digital really sat at 85% across the board, there's no earthly reason chains like these would keep opening doors, buying discs back off customers, and betting real rent money on people still wanting a physical copy in their hands. A store staying in business off secondhand trade is about as direct a sign as you'll get that the demand's still there. You can fudge a statistic. It's a lot harder to fudge a business owner paying rent to open another store.

A Zero-Dollar Receipt

Let me tell you a little something I ran into myself. You know how PS Plus tosses subscribers a handful of free games every month? I grabbed one of those, added it to my library.

Now, I'm not saying that one zero-dollar order goes marching straight into Sony's "digital sales" tally. I doubt the bookkeeping's that sloppy. But that little moment tells you something real: however a platform holder chooses to define "sale," "download," or "license acquired" changes the whole shape of the market — the one the customer sees, and the one the company reports.

A company that'll cut you an order form and a receipt for something it's handing out for free — and can then, when it's counting up "digital sales share," conveniently widen or narrow that same line however it likes — that's the slick move here.

I've got no smoking gun proving they cooked the books. But just holding the pen that writes the definition of the number? That's already winning half the fight before it starts.

Why I'm Calling It "Breaking Them In"

In the last pieces, I treated PlayStation fans' attachment to physical copies as something sentimental — the feel of holding a disc, the boxes lined up on a shelf, that kind of thing. Going back through this new material, though, I got a real uneasy feeling about it. Sony knows that attachment exists. Knows it well. And instead of arguing against it head-on, they're wrapping it in a frame — "this is just what the majority's already chosen" — that quietly turns that attachment into something irrational, something outdated.

Making you unable to argue back — that's the whole trick of breaking somebody in. Tell an angry customer "you're not the only one who feels that way, but 85% already went digital," and that customer just lost the ground to keep arguing on. Borrow the majority's name to shut the minority up. And it's worth mentioning Sony's currently facing a massive class-action suit in the UK over allegedly inflating prices on digital games and in-game content by throwing its market weight around. The hand that controls the price and the hand that controls the story tend to be the same hand.

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Closing It Out

First piece, I said the tide can't be turned back, so let's at least get a soft landing. Second piece, I said folks are finding their own way to adjust to that tide either way. This piece flips both of those.

Before you accept that "tide" as real, ask whether it's actually a tide — or a number built to look like one. If Sony wants trust from its customers, it needs to put honest numbers on the table first.

What Sony's doing right now isn't building trust. It's hiding behind a majority nobody can argue with, and using that cover to break its loyal customers in exactly the way it wants them.