At the 2016 World Economic Forum, a now-infamous campaign painted a “utopian” future: “You’ll own nothing and be happy.” That vision echoes in Sony’s latest act of corporate manifest destiny. In January 2028, the production of physical discs for new PlayStation games will end. The PlayStation 6 will usher in this new era by shipping without an internal disc drive—signaling the final transition from the permanence of plastic to the fleeting grip of digital dominion. 

After the 2028 deadline, buying a video game will be a very different proposition. Retail shelves will no longer stock plastic cases holding physical discs. Instead, gamers may pay up to $100 for an empty box containing only a printed digital access code. We’re already seeing this with Rockstar Games launching Grand Theft Auto VI disc-less, forcing players to buy an empty case for a download voucher.

This shift masks an ideological war against private property. We are entering an era in which digital ownership is increasingly concentrated in the servers of a few large gaming platforms. When you pay top dollar for a digital game, you’re no longer buying an asset. You are buying temporary access—a revocable contract that exists only until the service provider pulls the plug. 

Sony’s move is unprecedented in console gaming, but the switch to all-digital purchases happened in PC gaming about 15 years ago, which was roughly when Steam captured more than half the market for PC games. Today, Steam has a 75 percent market share for PC games and its largest competitors are also digital distributors. That means that when you buy a PC game today, you are almost certainly buying a revocable, limited license rather than owning the software outright.

Sony’s plan to follow in Steam’s footsteps follows years of its console competitors testing the waters. Xbox has long conducted a stealth phase-out of physical media, pushing digital-heavy releases like Call of Duty, in which the disc contains nothing but a 70 megabyte installer that depends on a massive network download. Similarly, Nintendo took a halfway approach with the Switch 2, using plug-in cards for massive files. Yet Nintendo and Xbox still preserve real ownership; their cartridges and discs act as physical proof of ownership that can be shared with a friend, borrowed from a brother, or resold to a secondhand store. Sony destroys this communitarian aspect of gaming. By ending physical manufacturing, a retail game voucher will permanently bind to a single PlayStation Network account upon redemption. The simple acts of sharing, lending, or trading a new game with friends will be completely dead. 

For years, streaming giants like Amazon conditioned us to “buy” digital movies, obscuring the fine print that we were only renting access to them. The supposed benefit was economic convenience: Isn’t it cheaper to pay a monthly fee for vast libraries like Netflix? No. The early dream of a unified digital library has been buried by corporate greed. “Content fragmentation” splits movies and television across dozens of competing streaming platforms. The dream of a digital Blockbuster has died with the video rental chains: Instead, to access the same catalog of movies you used to browse on a real shelf, you now have to fork out hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees to dozens of different digital distributors. If you refuse to pay the monthly toll, your access will be revoked instantly. 

The modern gaming landscape is a cultural graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of digital games lost to legal battles. Classic Spider-Man titles once on Xbox 360 are a prime example. When Activision’s Marvel license expired and Sony seized exclusive rights to the Spider-Man video game IP, these games vanished overnight from digital storefronts. Ongoing licensing disputes mean they cannot be legally purchased or downloaded on the latest hardware. 

The mass closure of legacy digital storefronts further compounds this threat. The closure of the Xbox 360 online marketplace and the end of the PS3 storefront mean that hundreds of digital-only titles and downloadable add-ons are being lost to time forever. When these stores go out of existence, any game without a physical counterpart dies with them. 

Look no further than Sony’s notification to PlayStation owners that it would permanently remove 551 StudioCanal movies from users’ libraries. Movies like Terminator 2 and Apocalypse Now—which customers paid full price to “purchase”—were abruptly marked for deletion due to shifting licensing agreements. Sony offered no refunds or compensation. Digital ownership lasts only as long as the contract behind it holds, and not a single day longer. 

The future is the past. As a video game nerd with a nostalgic reverence for the Arcade, I believe it’s time to return to retro systems. Consoles like the PlayStation 1 and 2 and physical cartridges are becoming the last bastions of true consumer autonomy; physical copies exist in the real world, immune to digital expiration dates or arbitrary erasure by our tech overlords. Furthermore, because a disc-free PS6 will lack an optical drive, gamers will no longer have backward compatibility with older generations, meaning millions of PS4 and PS5 discs will be rendered useless, unless they clutter their setups by keeping old consoles plugged in forever. 

Language matters. The word “purchase” has an objective meaning: the permanent transfer of property rights from a seller to a buyer. By retaining the right to strip access whenever it ceases to be profitable, Silicon Valley has corrupted the definition of a sale. When they treat purchases as high-priced rentals, tech companies must accept the ramifications. As the growing digital rights protest movement puts it: if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.

Sony’s disc ban is not an evolution of gaming—it is a hostile takeover of the consumer’s right to own things. I don’t want to live in Klaus Schwab’s corporate feudalism owning absolutely nothing—and if we don’t preserve physical media, we will be anything but happy.