Gamers Slam Sony’s Plan to Stop Game Discs in 2028 as Debate Spikes
The gaming community is still buzzing after Sony declared it will stop producing game discs starting in 2028. Even though the company likely expected the backlash to cool down during a six-day stretch of silence while it waited out another wave of Xbox job cuts, the reaction hasn’t faded—in fact, any thread remotely tied to PlayStation has been flooded with criticism. With both major platform holders seeming eager to turn the situation into a public spectacle, Steam players are now looking on and debating a different question: if Valve ever offered physical releases for PC games, would they actually buy them?
Before digging into the Reddit conversation driving this debate, it helps to understand why the argument doesn’t map neatly from console to PC. While a few loud voices in gaming regularly point to PC as proof that digital-only systems can work, PlayStation operates under a very different structure. With no general-purpose second-hand marketplace and no equivalent role for physical retailers, the main route to purchase games on the hypothetical PS6 would be through the PlayStation Store. That setup gives Sony full control over both pricing and distribution. PC, meanwhile, is built as an open ecosystem where multiple storefronts can compete—Steam, the Epic Games Store, GOG, and Xbox among them—so no single company can easily monopolize access to the platform.
That openness also changes what happens if a storefront disappears. If a PC storefront were to shut down, the ecosystem’s flexibility means games are more likely to be preserved through piracy, cracking, and emulation, reducing the chance that older titles vanish when a service ends. The concern is real: the closure of the PS3 and Vita storefronts is already part of that modern cautionary tale about digital preservation.
With that context in place, a Reddit user named Thund3rWolf27 asked a straightforward question: “If Steam opened up a system where you could buy physical copies of your games, would you buy them?” The thread’s overall answer was a clear “no.”
Several commenters pointed out practical problems with the idea. For one thing, most PC players don’t even have disc drives anymore, since laptops and desktop systems phased them out years ago. On top of that, convenience is a huge part of why Steam users have stayed with digital libraries. Over the last 15 years, they’ve grown used to having the same collection sync smoothly across multiple devices—such as the Steam Deck and older Steam Machine hardware—both of which also don’t include disc drives.
Valve could try to bridge the gap by packaging games as “code in a box,” but that wouldn’t be meaningfully physical in the way people usually mean. As one comparison in the discussion suggests, it would run into the same “not really a disc, just a code with extra steps” problem that surrounds the marketing debate around GTA 6.
Dog-Faced-Gamer summed up the “no need” argument by saying PC gaming doesn’t rely on a closed system like consoles do. Even if Steam stopped operating, they believe players would still find ways to keep playing their games, because PC isn’t locked to a single gatekeeper the same way.
CookCop echoed that sentiment while adding a preservation and rights angle. They said they like physical media like anyone else, but they wouldn’t purchase a physical Steam game. Their reasoning: Steam’s track record for letting customers continue playing the games they bought has been far more reliable than on other platforms, and on PC—if licenses were ever revoked—they’d be more likely to turn to piracy, which they consider easier to do on PC than on console.
bigfuzzydog also raised a technical workaround. Since Steam already supports DRM-free options on its store, a user could, if they wanted, locate the game’s executable and launch it directly without Steam running in the background.
PC Doesn’t Need Physical Media, But Console Does
In the PC world, storefronts such as GOG focus specifically on DRM-free purchases. That approach encourages a library built on the idea that once you buy a game, you truly own it. Players can often run titles outside a storefront, burn them to a disc, or make personal backups without the same kind of restrictions you see in more closed systems. There’s no overarching limit in the same way, and importantly, publishers can still choose to release PC games on physical media if they want to. The key difference is simply demand: PC users don’t show the same level of need for discs.
One commenter, Hara-K1ri, pushed back on the assumption that physical ownership is the only way to keep games accessible. They argued that they can already store purchased games locally on their PC, move them to a NAS, and even burn their own DVD or Blu-ray for physical “storage,” regardless of whether the original purchase was digital.
Even with that, physical media does come with real advantages—especially for sustaining a second-hand market. But the discussion points out a major tradeoff: consoles often depend on resellable discs to help keep pricing competitive, while Steam uses frequent sales and steep discounting that can make PC games just as affordable without needing a resale economy.
Ultimately, commenters argued that the PC and console markets are different enough that the end of discs doesn’t carry the same weight in each space. For PC players, convenience tends to matter more, and the open ecosystem helps blunt the downsides. For console players, the shift toward disc-less distribution is framed as more dangerous because it can create a corporate monopoly—meaning Sony can effectively hold the deciding power over how content is sold and accessed.
