PlayStation

Sony ends PlayStation disc production by January 2028, and popcar argues the real loss isn't the disc but the right to sell, lend, or keep a game a company can delist. PC stays ownable through GOG and DRM-free copies; consoles are heading for Netflix-style rental.

Then a developer who's run a studio for two decades agrees the honest fix is linguistic — stop letting stores say "buy" — while another pulls Sony's own filing: physical was 3% of 2025 revenue.

The joke lands because Sony just announced PlayStation is dropping physical media, and here's GitHub offering to put your code on a disc. Nice bit — except the 'GitHub' offer is a generic Microsoft Forms page anyone could have made, which is exactly what phishing looks like.

The thread couldn't decide if it was official, and enjoyed it anyway. One caught the archival irony: these would be burned discs, good for ~10 years, versus GitHub's real Arctic Code Vault. Another caught the copyright one: it asks permission to press your public repo to a CD — but training AI on all of it didn't need a checkbox.

The cutoff covers only new titles: discs released before January 2028 keep working, and Rockstar has already said GTA 6 ships as a download code in a box, not a disc.

One reader priced Dark Souls 3 at $11 used on eBay against $60 on the PlayStation Store; another asked why, with no game-swapping left, you wouldn't just buy on Steam.

Affected titles include Terminator 2, Total Recall, Rambo: First Blood, and The Deer Hunter; Sony's message says the content "will be removed from your video library."

Readers noted the pattern: Amazon remotely deleted Orwell's 1984 from Kindles in 2009, and Sony itself shipped a DRM rootkit on music CDs back in 2005.

Sony removed StudioCanal movies that customers had paid for on the PlayStation Store, no refund, because the licensing deal behind them expired. The thread linked two near-identical removals from the same week, including 551 movies deleted from accounts.

The core reversal: a buy button that was never a sale. As one commenter put it, your purchase lives in someone else's garage. Another pointed at first-sale doctrine: buy a paper book and you can resell or will it to your kids; buy the ebook and you own nothing.

The legal page is plain: 'due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed.' No refund. Titles named in the thread include End of Watch and a haul of kids' movies — one user lost Where's Waldo and Carmen Sandiego.

A teacher with a web-dev past put the blame on Sony's own contract: there's no good-faith reason to sign a license that lets the other side reach into a paid library and delete it.

Sony's notice blames “content licensing agreements” for pulling Terminator 2, Total Recall and 549 other films from purchased libraries. It's not the first time — the company tried the same move years ago.

The recurring demand in the thread is legal, not technical: stop letting a checkout button say “purchase” when what you get is a revocable license with no end date disclosed.