Consoles are just worse PCs now, and Sony is proving it

Sony dropped two pieces of bad news at once this week — physical disc production ends in 2028, and the PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores shut down next year. The simultaneous announcements read like a rip-the-band-aid PR move, but the combined message is hard to miss: you buy PlayStation games how and when Sony says you can.

The PS5 launched in 2020 at $400 without a disc drive and looked like a steal, especially when crypto mining had made graphics cards nearly impossible to find. Today that same ecosystem costs $250 more, PlayStation Plus prices have gone up, and Sony executives have openly said they want to extract more revenue from every PlayStation owner. Cutting physical retail — and the Walmarts and GameStops of the world — out of the equation is one obvious way to do that. Meanwhile, the exclusive games that once justified the hardware investment have slowed to a trickle: in six years, one new Naughty Dog game, one new Insomniac game, and a new God of War. The PS4 era prestige isn't carrying the same weight anymore.

PC Gamer's Evan Lahti wrote the headline "Well, I guess we won the console war" six years ago when Sony started bringing exclusives to Steam. The argument looked clean then — Steam had become the kingmaker for indie games and back-catalog sales, Xbox was putting everything on Windows and eventually Steam too, and the walls between platforms were falling. The counterargument was that consoles still had physical media, fixed hardware, and a curated experience. One by one, those differentiators are disappearing. Microsoft already surrendered exclusivity. Now Sony is surrendering physical media and, with the PS3 and Vita store closures, demonstrating again that it can and will pull the rug on older digital purchases whenever maintaining an aging storefront becomes inconvenient.

What's left is a closed digital garden where Sony sets the prices, controls the licenses, and charges $80 a year just to play online — on hardware that keeps getting more expensive. That's not a console in the traditional sense. It's a locked-down PC with fewer options, and the gap between that and just building or buying a gaming PC keeps narrowing.