Sony has made it pretty clear that it sees producing physical media as a shrinking, soon-to-be extinct practice, which is why it is stopping disc production for PS5 (and PS6) from January 2028. The "Don't Kill the Disc" petition has attracted over 350,000 signatures, but the backlash hasn't shown any sign of altering Sony's plans thus far. The nearest thing we've gotten to a response came in response to investor questions, where Sony said that they were seeing "no impact" on their business given that so much of it was already digital. Yet that doesn't mean that individual games can't still have significant physical presences, as was reported this week.

To wit, numbers from Resident Evil Requiem surfaced by Christopher Dring at The Game Business showed that physical media accounted for a majority of that game's sales in France and Japan, at 55 percent and 51 percent respectively, while Australia and UK figures showed a sizeable minority of 43 percent and 40 percent respectively. "Not all markets are built the same when it comes to the digital transition", says Dring.

It's fascinating data, especially given that physical sales were limited by production, with the game having sold out for long periods in the US, which goes some way to explaining the low 22 percent physical figure there.

As John points out in the DF Direct discussion embedded above, the move to digital here isn't a consequence of the tap finally going dry and physical sales ceasing due to customer demand - it's that the flow has ebbed low enough that companies like Sony feel like cutting the hose, as they've always wanted, is now something that they can get away with.

After all, digital sales are great for platform holders like Sony and Microsoft - they get to cut out retailers, distributors and manufacturers, resale becomes impossible, game prices can be more tightly controlled and user attention can be redirected as needed. Ultimately, more money then flows to these firms, which is especially important now given that the physical production of games consoles is getting unreasonably expensive due to the AI boom and triple-A video games remain extremely expensive to produce.

It's impossible to say that any one data point proves that Sony's position is unreasonable, but there are a lot of elements joining forces to produce a distinct miasma around the brand - not least the fact that the Sony decision was relegated to a three paragraph blog post, with no direct communication with the gamers or industry members affected. Only time will tell whether Sony chooses to clear the air.