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Sony Abandons Social Media for 24 Hours+ After Controversially Killing Physical Games
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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It's interesting because Japan has traditionally been very big on physical media. I guess Sony PlayStation has had some foreign CEOs recently that may be a factor??
Sony is a weird shitshow of a company. Too big and too many departments and branches, with no one knowing what the other is doing. Back in the day, as Sony Electronics was developing their first physical MP3 player, Sony Music was lobbying to make MP3s illegal. Department heads shift to a different branch and shutdown anything their predecessor was working on.
What you describe isn't weird for a large corporation. When a corporation is large enough, they're all like that.
Sony still seems especially bad about this. They fought for decades to have the dominant physical media format, from Betamax, to Minidiscs, to Memory sticks. They would eventually win with Blurays by selling the PS3 at a huge loss and now they want to abandon physical media?
The PS3 was released nearly 20 years ago and no media standard lasts forever. I think if you told them back then that the PS3 strategy would result in their media format being dominant for two decades, they wouldn't have said "ah well forget it, it's not worth it."
Bluray is starting to show it's age. The decision is really between creating a new physical media format or just going 100% digital. From a purely technological perspective digital makes a lot more sense.
The real problem is about trust and licenses. We don't trust a company when they announce plans to go 100% digital on the same week the break access to people's movies in their digital library. And they could set up a digital system that would allow you to sell your license to someone else, so you could give or sell your copy of the game to someone else. But we know that while that's technologically possible, they aren't going to do that.
So it's not a problem from a technology perspective, but it sucks for the consumer because of how they will implement the technology.
I don’t want games that aren’t going to end up in my attic within the decade, so that I can rediscover them in another half decade, and spend several hours trying to boot the legacy hardware to play them.
That whole experience of actually owning your stuff is gone, if you go digital. It’s not just the theoretical risk that they turn the server off. It’s the constant dependency on Sony servers, licenses, accounts, and digital catalog. Those dependancies precede even being able to look at what titles you own.
Do you remember finding your old WII as a kid? Jailbreaking it years after it became irrelevant, and showing your dad that you loaded all his favorite childhood games onto it for him? Contra, Russian Attack, … my son will never have that experience.
So it's mostly sentimentality? That's just the way it goes with tech, you have to get used to new ways of doing things.
Why I remember as a kid getting pop and chips at the gas station when my parents stopped there to fill up. If I get an EV my children won't ever have that experience.
I don't think sentimentality is a valid reason to stick with old technology.
The concerns about Sony supporting the servers long term and the fact that it's unlikely people will be able to sell or give away their games, those are valid concerns. Sentimentality over technology is silly to me.
It’s not just that experience in and of itself. That is only one experience derived from the lifetime benefit of ownership. You own the things that you enjoy. Hell, I remember playing the Wii… then I remember finding exploits in the Wii, providing replay value… then I remember learning how the Wii works in interesting ways… then I remember hacking the Wii… then I remember discovering a world of community content for hacked wiis… then I remember sharing that with my dad… then I remember regifting that Wii to my mother in law decades later…
Prior generations had the same benefits, be it with cars or whatever. The standards for ownership have been pretty consistent for consumers in the consumer market for centuries if not thousands of years. Suddenly, everything is being locked up and licensed back on fragile infrastructure you don’t own. That’s not tech advancing. That’s you loosing shit.
Sooner or later, people won’t be able to get physical medium at all for the games they enjoy. Favorites will be predestined to be a faded memory, not something you can choose to cherish over time (in a box somewhere, of course). Thats fragile.
What about when life gets busy and you’re suddenly out of touch with modern games? Want to bust out an oldie and kill some time? Tough luck… you never owned those old favorites you’d poured money and time into… That’s where it’s headed. I don’t call that advancement.
A lot of the sentimental stuff you're talking about was gone a long time ago. You used to get a manual with a game, maybe a map, some other stuff like that. It's been decades since that was a thing. Now you're just getting a storage medium, and when you put it in the console it triggers a download, unless you want to play the buggy version that came out on release day.
Would you suffer the same emotional trauma if you had a leaky roof and your physical game collection got damaged and was unplayable?
Why would your favourite game that was still saved on your console not be playable but putting a disc with the same data on it somehow would be?
You're getting a little too upset over the potential that you might not be able to play some games you deleted.
It sucks that people won't be able to sell or give away games, but it's a little over-dramatic to be upset over not having some box in your attic.
The basic concept wasn’t “there and then left” though, like I feel as though you’re implying. Games came with extra content like maps and guides, sure, but regardless you always bought and owned the game. This has been the case with board games, card games, other physical games, and even digital games since until recently.
That would be pretty upsetting, yes. I owned those, though. I very well may own that roof, too. There’s a lot to be said, considering a leaky roof may even be my own responsibility. You can loose access to a downloaded digital game, however, while maintaining the console fine.
Because of how the licensing framework operates with digital games. It’s no longer in your control to protect your access. Governance of your access isn’t owned by you anymore. When a game is designed to require purchase validation, which many are and they can be changed to retroactively, but the validation server goes offline, you can’t play it without modifying the system—assuming you can modify the system.
Games have become inaccessible in the past and will continue to do so. Requiring all games be virtual pretty much ensures all games will, sooner rather than later.
It also goes without saying, it’s a lot easier to protect a disk collection than it is a console. Consoles have many more moving parts that can fail, for obvious reasons.
I don’t think it’s too far fetched to be upset by this.
I think you might've replied to the wrong comment?
Unless Sony is planning on selling digital meth LOL.
How?
There's always going to be capacity limitations, they're bulky compared to an SD card, they can get scratched and who know if some discs will eventually suffer from disc rot as happened with DVDs.
For better or for worse (mostly worse) most games require patches now, so you'll need an internet connection if you don't want to be stuck playing the buggy initial release of a game.
games only require patching because developers cut corners thanks to internet connected consoles allowing for updates, before that we had literal decades of stable, playable games.
That has nothing to do with optical media, and everything to do with corporate stupidity and greed.
Bluray has enormous capacity, and compared to SD cards they literally cost pennies to print and manufacture.
the only disc rot I've heard about with regards to DVDs is a couple years where Warner Brothers specifically had an issue, which they ended up replacing all the discs for, granted it took them like 10 years to get enough pressure to get off their ass and do it, and it should have done it much sooner, so I'll concede that WB are cunts.. and I wager the reason they had rot is cause they tried to cheap out on the manufacturing and use something substandard.
I was once at a massive global company that seemed to actively encourage it. Access control in the building was super tight and we weren’t allowed on each others’ floors, had separate break rooms, the lot.
And Sony "solved" the issue by requiring you to use software called Sonicstage to transfer music, and that software re encoded everything as ATRAC with OpenMG DRM.
they saw the $$$ in perpetual subscriptions.
PlayStation has had foreign leadership for 7 years
How crazy is that for a Japanese company.
Nissan was ran by a Brazilian guy for almost 20 years.
Sure. I just found it humorous a multi-national company like Sony is run by a 'foreigner'. Foreigner to whom?
Most publicly traded companies are ran by a revolving door of CEOs from around the world. They live a totally different lifestyle from normal people. The majority of wealthy people are not aligned to any country. Only to money.
Most CEO's have a 'big item agenda' which they implement in 5-7 years. After that, it's time to move on to look for the next challenge. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing in and of itself as it provides new insights and goals for the company.
Sometimes this works and sometimes the company dies due to the incompetent new CEO or is a CEO hired by a hostile takeover private equity firm to extract as much money from it as possible.
Nothing is 100%, so for sure.
PlayStation, not Sony.
Omg. Do you know the difference between a product and a company?
I wish this would be the anine cabbage of the gaming world.
Wouldn't that have been the Golden Horse Armor?
Could this be a signal that CDs DVD and Bluray Discs production maybe coming to an end soon? The companies that make them are very likely reporting low sales and a lot of stock on hand.
I mean, I'm all for replacing physical items as it reduces physical plastic waste.
But it does put the onus on consumers to pay for the storage rather than the manufacturer and prices for digital are not any lower than physical so all it does is save the manufacturer money, not the consumer. If it resulted in a 10% decrease in game prices that would help.
The other issue however is that manufacturers do not guarantee a download will be available forever. If that were guaranteed there wouldn't be an issue, as digital games often need to be re-installed if a bug or error occurs.
physical media for movies and tv is next on the list. sony makes those, too.
It still is in regards to music releases.
Almost every indie creator in the touhou scene releases CDs on booth or somewhere adjacent.