#384: Box out

This week Sony announced that, with effect from January 2028, PlayStation games will no longer release on disc. Preservationists, collectors, bargain-hunters and, let’s be honest here, cool old-school folks who just dig the look of boxes on shelves have spent the last couple of days lamenting the death, if we can really call it that, of physical media. This has, of course, been coming. It was on the cards long before this week’s announcement, long before Rockstar confirmed last week that the physical release of GTAVI would be a download code in a box; long, even, before Sony shipped a cheaper, discless version of the PS5 in 2020 as a sign of which way it expected, and surely wanted, the wind to blow.

I have no dog in this fight, really. I went all-digital in the early days of the PS4, when review code shifted overnight from discs to downloads, and I saw little point fighting the tide. But I reckon that even those of you with overflowing shelves would admit that boxed games have, in a way, been dead for a while. Scan the last few game-of-the-year lists on the website of your choosing and you’ll find a host of bangers that never got a sniff of a physical release. Firstparty Xbox games have been code-in-a-box affairs for a while now, a fact that has barely been mentioned amid the furore surrounding Sony’s announcement because, obviously, no one has ever bought a physical copy of a firstparty Xbox game, why would you. Switch 2’s Game Key Cards exist too, of course. Elsewhere there are disc-based games that won’t unlock without an online licence check, or won’t work without a day-one patch. That old notion of buying a game in a shop, taking it home and putting it on a shelf where it will be forever accessible hasn’t really been a thing for years now.

None of that makes this any easier to stomach, of course. It hurts even if, like me, you haven’t bought a game in a decade, because it is not about the news itself but what it represents. This is the purest expression to date of the extent to which Sony no longer gives a shit about its customers. Can you name me a single move that Sony — the company, lest we forget, of the legendary marketing line For The Players — has made in the PS5 era that actually seems to have had the interests, needs or desires of those players at its core? I certainly cannot think of one. All I can think of are the constant price rises, the company-wide drive to forcibly shove an entire generation’s worth of exploitative live-service guff down our gullets, and more rounds of layoffs, cancellations and closures that you can shake a DualSense at.

I’ve seen it suggested that Sony timed this announcement quite deliberately, knowing that piggybacking onto the GTA news would give it some cover, and that Microsoft’s imminent layoffs would soon sweep it from the headlines. But honestly, I doubt anyone over there even thought about it in those terms. Sure, the optics are terrible coming from a company that has spent the PS5 era jacking up prices, and is now moving to make sure retailers can no longer undercut them. They look even worse just a week after Sony removed 550 movies from its download store, leaving buyers unable to watch them. They are somehow made even worse given Sony’s announcement, on the same day, that it is closing the download stores on PS3 and Vita. I mean, holy shit! And of course this is all very rotten coming from the company of that legendary E3 skit, showing one exec lending a boxed game to another, a thumbing of Sony's nose at Microsoft’s all-digital plans for Xbox One, the greatest diss track games have ever known.

But that was, god almighty, 13 years ago, and things have changed out there. The Sony of 2026 doesn’t think about optics, because it doesn't give a fuck about what you want, or what you think. It knows that, in the face of such dismal competition, it can do whatever it wants and still win. This is just the world we’re living in, I’m afraid. Whether you have a bookcase full of boxed games or not, this is one more kick in the teeth from a company and an industry that these days excel at it like nothing else, and that at this rate will leave us all drinking soup through a straw. At least you can still buy those in a shop, I guess.

MORE!

• In related news, Xbox boffins are reportedly hard at work on a ‘disc-to-digital’ scheme, which will allow you to pop a physical game into your console and generate a licence for its digital version. The feature, which will apply to all Xbox Series games, some Xbox One games, but no OG Xbox or 360 games (which is annoying because that seems to me to be the ideal use case for it) appears to be in development for the next Xbox, codenamed Project Helix. You might think that the timing of this report is a little, erm, let’s say ‘convenient’, given the flak Sony’s been taking this week for fucking over boxed-game die-hards. Glancing at the byline on The Verge’s report, I think you might be onto something.
• Not all Microsoft leaks are managed this well, alas, and as such news continues to dribble out about the imminent Asha Sharma reorg. IO Interactive has been forced into layoffs by Microsoft pulling funding for its in-development online RPG, Project Fantasy. Microsoft is also freezing, hopefully only temporarily, thirdparty Game Pass deals. And Arkane appears to be the latest studio to be considered for the chopping block. Honestly, if they go ahead with that they can forget about ever turning things around. There is no coming back from such vandalism.
• Krafton and Subnautica maker Unknown Worlds have settled their $250m lawsuit out of court. Boo and hiss! I was enjoying that, embarrassing as it was. The terms of the deal are not being made public (booing intensifies) but Krafton has agreed to pay bonuses to the studio’s entire staff, rather than just its three founders, which is nice. Ted Gill, who was restored to the CEO’s chair by a court order, has agreed to sling his hook with immediate effect.
• Capcom has brought forward the release date of Onimusha: Way Of The Sword by a few weeks to avoid the late-September crush. Not the last of its kind, one imagines. It still looks like a bloodbath, and now Capcom’s blinked it’s safe for everyone else to do it too.
• Ubisoft has put Christoph Hartmann in charge of its newish Creative House 2, where he will oversee Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell and The Division. A co-founder and former president of 2K Games, Hartmann’s appointment certainly gives Ubisoft’s new era a little stardust — providing you’re able to overlook the fact that his most recent gig involved twiddling his thumbs in between game cancellations as VP of Amazon Games.
• Hit Points sends its sympathies to peripheral maker Dbrand, which has had a bit of a week. The firm drew much acclaim, and 15,000 expressions of interest, after it released a render of a Steam Machine case that turned Valve’s new living-room PC into a Portal Companion Cube. The problem? No one ever thought to check Valve was okay with it. Evidently Valve wasn’t, and following a swift legal intervention the case has been removed from Dbrand’s website. “We’re going to regret that decision for a very long time,” a spokesperson sobbed. “Unfortunately, being proud of the thing we made did not give us the right to make it.”
• I did not know, until just now, that M2 has been working on a thirteen-game Ganbare Goemon collection for Switch, PS5 and PC. It’s out now, but only in Japan, and I am sad.
• On the plus side, here’s Warp Point, a good old-fashioned webring for indie games media. So much good stuff on here and Hit Points is honoured to be involved. I insist you bookmark it immediately.

That’ll do! I've been out most of today, so haven't had time to turn off that 55% discount on annual subscriptions. Oops. Dive in, if you like. Have a great weekend!