Going all-digital on consoles? PC's 20-year experiment has some answers

GTA 6 skipping a physical release and Sony planning to stop pressing PlayStation discs by January 2028 have reignited the debate around digital-only gaming. The backlash has been loud, but for PC gamers none of this is new — the platform has been effectively discless for well over a decade.

Steam launched in 2003 to a hostile reception. Players on dial-up connections saw it as clunky DRM with no clear upside, and Valve's storefront felt half-baked at launch. What changed the equation was content: if you wanted Half-Life 2, then Portal, then Team Fortress 2, you had to use Steam. That captive audience gave it a foothold. Third-party games arrived — starting with the largely forgotten Rag Doll Kung Fu — and the platform grew into something bigger than a Valve launcher. Faster internet speeds and larger hard drives caught up with the concept, and Steam's own interface steadily improved. Publishers, meanwhile, were spooked by piracy and the second-hand market, and found that tying games to a single account was a cleaner solution than one-time-use codes or other disc-era workarounds. For consumers, Steam's regular sales and centralised library eventually made it feel like a convenience rather than an obstacle.

By the 2010s, physical PC games had already become a rarity. The same shift was happening across music, film, TV, and software — digital distribution won those fights too, and the games industry followed. The PC experience suggests the transition is survivable and, for many players, genuinely preferable once the ecosystem matures. But the console situation isn't a straight copy-paste: PC's move to digital was gradual and driven partly by consumer choice, while Sony's disc phase-out is a top-down deadline. Console players also skew broader than the PC audience, and concerns about game preservation, internet access in underserved regions, and the loss of a resale market are legitimate in ways that weren't fully resolved on PC either — they were largely just accepted over time.

Whether the console transition goes smoothly will depend on how much goodwill platform holders have built, how competitive and consumer-friendly their storefronts are, and whether players feel they're gaining convenience or simply losing options. PC's history says digital can work — it doesn't say it's painless.