In 2013, Sony published a brief, wordless video that became a minor viral moment among gamers. A company executive, seated across a desk from a colleague, simply slides a PlayStation disc across the polished surface. The recipient takes it, nods, and the clip ends. The message was unmistakable: physical media meant freedom—the effortless ability to lend, share, or resell a game. That silent handover, now recalled by German tabloid Bild, has acquired the texture of an artefact from a vanishing world.

From its Tokyo headquarters, Sony Interactive Entertainment confirmed this month that it will cease manufacturing physical discs for new titles starting in January 2028. The decision, the company said, reflects a consumer shift: by 2025, 78 percent of PlayStation purchases were already digital downloads. The upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, widely expected to be the decade’s biggest release, will arrive exclusively as a digital file. For a console brand built on CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays since the mid-1990s, the move draws a line under a 35-year tradition.

The announcement on the official PlayStation X account has been viewed 145 million times and drawn 90,000 replies, many of them sharply critical. Users pointed to the competitive pricing sustained by a second-hand disc market, and to a recent incident in which Sony itself revoked access to over 500 purchased StudioCanal films due to licensing changes—a reminder that digital ownership is often a revocable licence. Game designer Hideo Kojima, speaking at a film festival in Italy, said he was saddened by the end of discs and warned that a digital-only future could one day strip people of content they believed they owned. The backlash spilled into brand marketing: GitHub offered to burn users’ code repositories onto CD-ROMs “physically yours, forever. Until you lose it, let’s be real,” while KFC España joked about downloadable fried chicken.

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky has already detected fraudulent websites exploiting the digital-only hype. Fake pre-order pages for GTA VI, mimicking official PlayStation storefronts with star ratings and age labels, harvest personal data and payment details. Other sites promise leaked beta versions that install malware. The scams, reported by CNN Indonesia, target multiple languages and prey on the urgency surrounding a digital launch that offers no physical alternative to verify authenticity.

Sony has offered a small concession: publishers may still reorder disc pressings for games released before the 2028 cutoff, though the ordering process will change. The company is converting its disc plant in Salzburg, Austria, into a facility for optical microlenses. Meanwhile, the PlayStation X account has fallen silent since the July 1 post. The image that lingers is not the sleek digital storefront of the future, but that 2013 desk, where a disc passed from one hand to another without a word—a gesture that, for millions of players, once defined what it meant to own a game.