Sony's disc exit: higher prices, dying retailers, and a €400M lawsuit

Sony's announcement that it will stop manufacturing physical PlayStation discs in January 2028 has triggered a wave of industry pushback — from retail analysts calling it a hammer blow for game stores, to a Dutch consumer group arguing it hands Sony a total monopoly over game pricing.

The pricing concern is backed by hard data. Dutch price-tracking site Tweakers analysed 16 first- and third-party PS5 games over four years and found that physical copies are almost always cheaper than their PlayStation Store equivalents. Retail prices drop gradually and keep falling; PS Store prices snap back up after sales end. First-party exclusives are the worst offenders — of all Sony titles in the survey, only Horizon Forbidden West has ever received a permanent price cut on the PS Store, dropping from €80 to €60. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, for example, still sits at its original launch price years later. The report's blunt conclusion: statistically, the physical version of a PS5 game is most likely to cost less at any given moment. Once discs disappear, that pressure on Sony's pricing disappears with them.

That's exactly the argument Dutch consumer group Stichting Massaschade & Consument is making in its €400 million ($457 million) lawsuit against Sony. The group, which targets the 30% cut Sony takes on every PlayStation Store sale — a fee physical retail was never subject to — says the disc announcement only strengthens its case. SM&C chair Lucia Melcherts put it plainly: "No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it." The comparison to Epic's battle with Apple's App Store is hard to ignore — Apple, which similarly controls both the hardware and the only permitted storefront, was eventually forced to loosen its grip. Sony's PlayStation revenue hit ¥4.69 trillion ($29 billion) in 2025, so a $457 million lawsuit is manageable, but it's unlikely to be the last legal challenge the company faces over its store policies.

For physical retailers, the picture is grim. Analyst Rhys Elliot from Alinea Analytics called the news a "hammer blow for games retail" and pointed to the pre-owned market as "one of the rusty engines keeping specialist retailers alive" — an engine that code-in-box replacements will kill entirely, since a download code has no resale value, can't be lent, and offers no collectability. Chris Dring at The Game Business confirmed PlayStation physical games still account for millions of sales worldwide and called the decision a clear blow to retail. The UK's Entertainment Retailers Association, noting that PS5 and PS4 together represented half of all UK physical game revenue in 2025, pushed back hard, saying millions of gamers value true ownership. The one slim lifeline for stores is that code-in-box sales could let retailers participate in digital distribution — the model Rockstar is already using for GTA 6 — but as Elliot noted, that strips away everything that made physical worth buying in the first place.