While there has been plenty of backlash against Sony for its plans to end the production of PlayStation discs from January 2028 onwards, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot doesn’t think it’s a big deal. During a recent investor call (via PCGamer), Guillemot was asked how Sony’s decision will affect Ubisoft going forward, to which he said it was “no big deal”.
Guillemot pointed to the PC market, where physical releases of games are essentially non-existent outside of rare releases, and noted that it helped growth on the platform. He also brought up the costs associated with the production of discs and the creation of hardware like disc drives. Overall, however, he doesn’t think that the market will be affected too badly.
“What we saw on the PC is that it helped to grow the market,” Guillemot said. “There’s also some pressure for the future on the cost of machines, and being able to be only digital will help to have more accessible machines, I would say. There are pluses and minuses, but we think it will not disturb the industry too much.”
While PC as a gaming platform has been dominated by digital releases for over a decade at this point, it is also worth considering that it is an open platform, leaving the door open for potential market disruption from new players. Thanks to this, companies like Limited Run Games are able to collaborate with indie studios to create special edition physical releases for the platform through portable storage drives. Consoles, on the other hand, are closed platforms, with their respective manufacturers keeping tight control over the software developed and released on their hardware.
Recently, an analysis of the used games market indicated that it was worth $7.2 billion, and would be worth up to $13.8 billion by 2034. This market could be heavily impacted by Sony’s decision. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities said that while there were likely cost-saving factors for the decision, “there can be no question that the consumer pays the tax in terms of less optionality.” F-Squared’s Michael Fuffter went as far as to call it “an extremely anti-consumer decision” that “has no legitimate justification and communicates a disdain for players in their ecosystem.”
“Sony would love for us to believe that the PC market’s shift to digital is the exact same thing as consoles going down that path. It simply isn’t.”
Sony’s announcement has also drawn sharp criticism from the UK’s Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA), with CEO Kim Bayley saying that the company is valuing “corporate convenience over consumer choice.”
“Every year, millions of gamers still choose to buy physical copies because they value true ownership. A disc can be shared with family, traded in, collected, preserved, and crucially, still played years from now. A download licence often offers none of those freedoms.”
Bayley went on to say that “removing discs doesn’t represent progress – it simply removes choice,” calling the decision generally bad for not only retailers, but for consumers as well.
For more, take a look at our thoughts on the matter.
