Physical Media is Dying

Jake Ellis

Physical media is dying. I, for one, cannot wait to purchase a temporary licence for everything I ever buy. I look forward to the day Paramount Pictures and the ghouls who run it crack open my brain and rip Transformers One from my mind because they decided it wasn’t worth running on Paramount Plus, my FAVORITE streaming service.

Sony just announced that, come January 2028, they will cease making physical discs for new games released on PlayStation. This comes right after they scrubbed more than 550 movies from PlayStation libraries without warning or refund, despite raking in $7.5 billion in profit in 2025. Their terms of service state: “Use of the terms ‘own,’ ‘ownership,’ ‘purchase,’ ‘sale,’ ‘sold,’ ‘sell,’ ‘rent,’ or ‘buy’ in this Agreement or in connection with PSN Content does not mean or imply any transfer of ownership of any content.” But this is a calculated manipulation of what the everyday public understands those words to mean. You can’t do anything without agreeing to a document far too sprawling for any reasonable person to sit down and read. If they were being truthful, you would NEVER click “buy” on a Sony PlayStation product, but rather “rent until we decide it’s over.” I can’t imagine that would inspire many sales.

As video games have improved drastically, they have also become increasingly expensive. Most games don’t even fully come on the disc now. requiring further downloads. Sony could have invited a new form of physical media, but why would they ever consider that? They have found a way to charge the same amount of money for something with no physical production cost. We aren’t going to feel the savings they will gain from no longer producing discs. Instead, they’ll be a nice little kickback for the company that was smart enough to release Morbius twice in cinemas. What precedent does this set? When I was a kid, I can remember borrowing Just Cause 3 from a classmate, playing it for a month or so, and returning it afterwards. I can also remember letting a neighbour borrow my copy of Lego Marvel Superheroes 2. Now, if you ever wish to play a game, you will have to buy it. Sorry, you will be granted a temporary licence to it. A temporary licence whose terms you are not made privy to and which—as we have seen—can be taken away without any notice. The money you worked hard to save up to buy GTA 6 might as well have been burnt when Sony decides that running GTA servers is too much hassle in the future and removes the game from your library. If they could break into your house to steal the physical copies of content you own for a quick buck, they would without a moment’s consideration.

Hundreds of older games fade from digital purchase as their licences expire, and the only copies that remain are physical: Transformers: War for Cybertron, the old Lord of the Rings games, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2. Even if you don’t have any reverence for these old games, it is clear that the hard work of thousands of people will never be experienced again. This will only continue as the sliding scale of time swallows up the games you or your siblings played as kids. On top of this, game resales—which are often one of the only ways people can afford games—will be a thing of the past. Physical media is key to preserving these works of art. You don’t have to care about video games to see that this is a dangerous step towards the total death of physical media. Video games, movies, television, and music are all wonderfully interactive forms of human imagination and creativity that exist primarily in digital forms, but soon will be confined there entirely.

The same is true for books. Amazon’s market share in e-book sales is 68 percent, but with other factors included it is estimated that they control up to 85 percent of all e-book sales. Being the publishing powerhouse they are, Amazon heavily incentivises exclusivity with the Kindle Store: authors who choose this route will see their royalties boosted from 35 percent to 70 percent, while Amazon gets total control over the distribution of their work. Furthermore, following a recent change in 2025, e-books bought through Amazon can only be read on Amazon-approved devices and cannot be transferred to other devices. It is obvious that Amazon has an almost total monopoly on digital literature. They could force you to read the Bible on their smart vacuum if they wanted to. Much like Sony, they also have the ability to get rid of your digital library without warning or a refund. The biggest example of this, and a rather grim display of irony, is Amazon removing hundreds of copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from users’ devices due to a copyright issue. The scarier thing they can do, and have been doing, is alter your books without letting you know. This feature can be opted out of, but Amazon writes their terms of service—they control the rules here. It is typically used to correct typos or censor problematic content, but who decides what’s problematic? Amazon. What’s more, in order to access the wealth of literature Amazon holds, you must pay a subscription fee. A subscription fee whose price they have very recently jacked up. Your access to information, art, and thought has a dollar value attached to it, which can be hiked up increment by increment.

This is much more than discs, e-books, and DVDs. Physical media validates ownership. You actually bought it; it is yours to hold, watch, play, break, burn, or use to make fucking pizza on. It preserves the work for future generations. It restricts censorship. It ensures history remains rather than being erased. Physical media represents a fixed point in time. Digital media is just software that you don’t own, which can be updated, corrected, altered, or deleted whenever Big Tech feels like it. It’s your fucking shit, dude. Why should anyone other than you get a say in how it exists? In 2025, the American Library Association reported that 5,668 books had been banned in libraries across the country. It was reported that 40 percent of challenged books included representations of LGBTQ+ people or people of colour. Paramount has bent the knee to the current US administration and Israel, and we all know Jeffrey B. goes where the money takes him, so it’s only a matter of time before other media conglomerates do the same. With that, what’s stopping games with clear queer themes, like The Last of Us and Life is Strange, from being scrubbed away? Or your copy of To Kill a Mockingbird from being quietly revised under your nose?

What can we do in the meantime? Put pressure on Sony over the precedent it may set going forward. Go sign the “Don’t Kill the Disc” petition on Change.org. Maybe, just maybe, the pressure will force Sony to crack. We just saw Meta roll back their Muse AI image-generation feature on Instagram, so there is value in bullying these corporations. In the meantime, buy physical media and enjoy it while you still can. Go out and buy real books. If you’re only really renting the licence to a PDF online, get out there and rent a physical book from your local library. I love comic books, and I am privileged enough to buy physical copies, even if I would save much more by buying them all digitally. None of this is to shame anyone for using Amazon or Sony or Spotify—God knows I do—but there is a real magic in consuming art someone has made by holding it in your hands, placing the game disc in your console, or hitting play on your CD player. 

If you have media you have purchased digitally, find a way to store it locally on a USB drive or hard drive. The future is digital; it would be foolish of me to deny this. But there are things you can do to ensure this future arrives more in your favour. There has been an upward trend in Gen Z purchasing more DVDs, CDs, vinyl records, and cassettes. With such an overwhelming glut of content online, this is not surprising in the slightest. I understand that many of these are privileges to own and that not everyone has the funds to go out and continue to support this trend, but I stumble across hundreds of gems at thrift stores, through online resellers on Trade Me, or on other online marketplaces. There will always be people willing to keep this format alive. Physical media isn’t dying because it has become obsolete; it is dying because real ownership isn’t as profitable as endless subscriptions and temporary licences. I hope more people come to realise that ownership, preservation, and denying mass corporate control are more valuable than convenience. If not, no one should really be surprised when David Ellison breaks your television over his knee because it was only ever really “borrowed.”