Protests have continued ever since Sony announced its plan to end physical releases by 2028, while official PlayStation social media accounts even stopped posting for several days. Some players therefore hoped the company might eventually reverse its decision. Leading analysts and major figures in the industry, however, believe that outcome is almost impossible.

Users have been up in arms since Sony announced that physical releases would end in 2028. Social media has been flooded with criticism, while the company suspended posts on official PlayStation accounts for several days. That led some players to optimistically suggest that Sony might still change its mind. It would certainly be the preferred outcome for many, but major industry analysts believe the decision is effectively irreversible.

Sony’s Decision Is Irreversible

Serkan Toto, director of the Japanese consulting firm Kantan Games, told IGN that PlayStation will not back down. “I sympathize with fans of physical media, but Sony isn’t going to back down. The company was aware of what the online reaction would be and is just waiting for the storm to pass,” he said. According to the analyst, even a boycott of PlayStation Network would not be enough to make the company reconsider. “Around 50 million people are subscribed to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let’s say 500,000 cancel their accounts in protest. That would mean Sony has lost 1% of that business area. It’s not enough for them to reconsider the decision. The digital market is too lucrative.”

Regardless of the prediction itself, Toto is undoubtedly right about one point: digital games are more profitable for the company. There is no second-hand market, lending systems are deliberately underdeveloped, and competition is effectively removed. That can make it easier, for example, to introduce another game price increase and make it genuinely effective. None of this even takes into account that Sony earns more from every game sold digitally than from copies purchased in stores. In a 2020 analysis, Serkan Toto explained that PlayStation’s owner loses between $10.50 and $21 on every game sold through a physical retailer, depending on whether it comes from a third-party or first-party developer.

Matt Piscatella, the analyst who previously predicted the end of physical media by 2028, is not convinced that Sony will reverse course either. “A major misinterpretation I see regarding Sony’s decision to go exclusively digital is that many people think the company believes no one cares about physical media. That’s not true; everyone knows there’s a user base that is interested in it. The decision to go exclusively digital reflects that PlayStation doesn’t believe it’s an attractive market to maintain or grow. It’s about the numbers: potential revenue, costs, margins, assumed digital conversion rate, time, energy, and focus. Gamers will decide whether those numbers were correct or not,” he wrote on his Bluesky profile.

The analyst places particular emphasis on an earlier statement by Sony CFO Lin Tao. In February, the executive said the company would mitigate the impact of rising memory costs by “prioritizing monetization of the existing PlayStation 5 installed base and expanding revenue from software and network services.” That statement sounds very different after the brand’s latest major announcement. According to Piscatella, in a world where consoles could cost more than one thousand euros, “the focus shifts from attracting the mass market to targeting only consumers with greater purchasing power, who are less price-sensitive and have a higher preference for convenience.”

Journalist Jason Schreier did not explicitly say whether Sony might reverse the decision, but he sounded highly skeptical about the situation. “The problem, and this is what the spreadsheets Sony has been working on were about, was calculating how many of their customers would be impacted by this decision and how many would actually care enough. And they’ve determined that there’s a significant enough user base in digital that they don’t need discs,” he explained in a video. The most optimistic assessment came from Daniel Ahmad, research director at Niko Partners: “I think Sony will respond in some way, given the criticism, and I honestly think they should have announced this when they were ready to explain how discs will work on PlayStation 6, but I’d be surprised if, at this point, they completely reversed course.”

Sony almost certainly knew the decision would provoke widespread anger, but it may also have calculated that the reaction would have only a negligible short-term effect on financial results or user numbers. The company’s major bet may be that players will have accepted the new reality by the time PlayStation 6 launches. Sony is also aware that the console could be hurt by current component costs, but it appears to believe that ending physical releases will not cause a major decline in sales. In two or three years, players will decide whether those calculations were correct.

Source: 3DJuegos