Following recent online discussions on the potential death of physical media for games, CEO of prominent US-based retailer GameStop, Ryan Cohen, has said that physical releases of games don’t matter to the company. In an interview with Bloomberg, Cohen was asked about the potential impact of Sony’s decision to end PlayStation disc production in January 2028. To this, he replied that “it doesn’t matter at all” and that “it is totally, totally irrelevant”.
As the publication notes, the entire gaming industry’s decision to move on to digital releases has led to GameStop heavily altering its business model. Rather than focusing on games, the retailer has instead moved to focusing on the sale of trading card games from properties like Pokémon. This decision has gone on to account for 41 percent of the business.
Cohen also refused to discuss the potential impact his stance would have on the highly-anticipated November 19th release of Grand Theft Auto 6, which many analysts are considering to be one of the largest launches that the industry may have seen. When the controversy surrounding its physical release not including discs was brought up, Cohen instead insisted on changing the subject.
PlayStation had announced its decision earlier this month, noting that it was “a natural direction” for the company to keep it aligned with modern consumer behaviour.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” said the company. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
While there has been plenty of backlash against this announcement, analysts don’t really think Sony is going to reverse course anytime soon. Kantan Games CEO Dr. Serkan Toto, for instance, believes that the company is simply waiting for the protests to run their course.
“I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision,” said Dr. Toto. “They, of course, knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.”
“Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users. Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let’s say 500,000 cancel in protest; that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course, not enough to Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative.”
Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners said that, while he expects Sony to respond to the backlash in some way, the company isn’t likely to change its mind on stopping the production of discs.
“For what it’s worth, I do think Sony will respond in some capacity given the backlash (and, to be honest, they shouldn’t have announced this until they were ready to disclose how discs would work on PS6), but I’d be surprised if they do a full reversal at this point,” wrote Ahmad in a social media post.
In the meantime, the fact that the physical release of a game includes a disc has become a marketing move for many companies, including Halo Studios, Santa Monica Studio, and Insomniac Games. However, rumors have indicated that Halo: Campaign Evolved, despite coming with a disc, will still need to download quite a bit of the in-game content before being playable.
