A game-dev of 20 years says the fix is to ban the word "buy" — and only 3% of Sony's revenue is physical

The argument: not the disc, the deed

Prompted by Sony ending physical PlayStation discs by January 2028, popcar's essay makes a deliberate reframe: stop arguing physical-versus-digital and argue ownership. Three harms follow from digital-only, the author writes: you lose the right to trade, sell or loan a game; titles can be delisted and lost (the post claims most pre-2014 games are already gone without preservation efforts); and you lose rental, used-game and third-party pricing, leaving the platform to set every price alone. PC is the counterexample — GOG, Itch.io and DRM-free copies mean you can still hold the actual bits. The endgame he warns about is a subscription where games work only while you keep paying.

The thread hands him a better argument than the essay

The 248-comment discussion sharpened the point from an angle the blog didn't take — the supply side. Someone who's lived it wants the honesty forced at the checkout:

"I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought" — the owner of a 20-year game studio

Then the number that reframes Sony's move as barely a business decision at all:

"only 3% of Sony's 2025 revenue came from physical game sales." — a commenter citing Sony's corporate report, page 37

And a genuine flip on the preservation panic — from someone who used to buy used physical games and changed his mind:

"I will be able to actually play games further into the future if I buy digitally. This is the opposite of what proponents of physical media heavily argue … but I suspect it's how lots of 'regular people' … feel." — a former used-game buyer

Even the framing of the fight got a small history correction: the arcade-era "they always wanted you renting" story is tidy but wrong on the facts — a longtime infrastructure engineer noted operators, not developers, ran most cabinets, and the coin box never phoned home.

Where it actually lands for you

The disc is a red herring on both sides — Sony loses almost nothing killing it, and preservation may be better served by a downloadable copy than a scratched Blu-ray you can't reinstall. What's genuinely disappearing is the legal category of "yours." The cleanest lever isn't nostalgia for plastic; it's the studio owner's: make the store say "rent" when it means rent, and let buyers price that honestly.