From a business perspective, I understand this. The physical games sections of most retailers are pitiful these days - take a walk down the PS5 aisle in Target or Best Buy for example. They also have a need to shore up margins if they want to keep subsidizing the hardware during the component crisis. And their biggest competitor, XBox, is in the process of pivoting out of their current pivot and apparently is about to layoff a massive chunk of its workforce.
But at the end of the day, part of what makes a console a console to me is the ability to swap games with friends. If I can't do that easily, why wouldn't I just use Steam?
OuterVale · 2026-07-01 12:40:05 UTC
Shutting down the stores on the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita, too.
Closing the online store for older systems simultaneously with announcing the dropping of physical media leaves an interesting question for the future. Even if you’ve never bought an online PS3 or Vita game, you’ll still be able to use the systems for physical games. Presumably once the PS6 store is gone, any console is just an ornament if you don’t have access to an account with games already purchased (and how long will the download servers stay up anyway? What is the foreseeable future?).
AussieWog93 · 2026-07-01 12:56:05 UTC
The assumption is that it'll be jailbroken well before they shut down the store.
Cthulhu_ · 2026-07-01 13:25:02 UTC
I'm not convinced, jailbreaks are becoming more difficult.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 13:29:48 UTC
theoretically, the playstations are the most vulnerable since they run static versions of a FreeBSD derived system. the xbox doesn't really need to be jailbroken and the switch line is nearly impossible
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 14:04:07 UTC
Given enough time, I'm sure it will happen, if only because they're not going to get security updates until the end of time.
And even if true, there's always emulation (also a pain though).
dice · 2026-07-01 13:24:46 UTC
I was having this discussion with my 9 year old yesterday. He mentioned that a friend had Rocket League on their Switch 2 and "it didn't even need a game card". I told him that anything without a physical card can be taken away, the company that made it can decide to take it back or to stop letting it work. Compared that to my old DS which he found along with game cards for Lego Star Wars and Scribblenauts that still work ~20 years later.
I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 13:26:50 UTC
Your point stands, but Rocket League specifically is free (this wasn't always true, but is now...)
ZiiS · 2026-07-01 13:36:20 UTC
Be aware that many (most) new games with physical disks can also be taken away (see Concord).
officeplant · 2026-07-01 13:51:57 UTC
We must simply raise kids to understand the pitfalls of live service games and how they should never be trusted or given money.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 13:27:32 UTC
Shit, they tried a while ago with a lot of pushback. I hope they don't. I love my vita, and while realistically anybody playing one nowadays has it hacked and can get games from wherever they please, it sucks that the only official way is going the way of the dodo
Hamuko · 2026-07-01 13:28:48 UTC
This is why I will not be buying a PlayStation 6. I've had my Steam account for 20 years (21 come October) and I can still download every single thing I've ever bought there. Why should I invest in buying PS6 games when they're gonna be made obsolete by Sony?
Uvix · 2026-07-01 16:26:02 UTC
You can still download games for PS3 and Vita after they stop selling them. It’s no different from how Steam no longer sells some titles it used to.
makyavelist · 2026-07-01 12:41:00 UTC
Step by step...
zache6 · 2026-07-01 12:45:27 UTC
Sucks to see this right after the Studio Canal movie situation [1]. I won't be getting another PlayStation.
Why would anyone “buy” movies from PlayStation. That’s not their business, I would never have expected them to be in it for the long haul, just like MS did a rug pull on this a few years ago didn’t they?
podgietaru · 2026-07-01 14:25:37 UTC
It was their business, because they sold them....
x13 · 2026-07-01 14:36:17 UTC
Convenience? Maybe a belief the media would be accessible for a long time, versus the ever-changing catalog available from streaming services?
Consumers are lured into walled-gardens all the time - consoles, app stores, hardware. Where would you suggest someone purchase a digital license for a movie?
MBCook · 2026-07-01 15:39:06 UTC
Apple has been selling movies for far longer haven’t they? Amazon is clearly invested in the space. Even Google.
From a video game store is the part I find odd. I get walled gardens. Not this one for this purpose.
fredoralive · 2026-07-01 12:45:39 UTC
Well, I guess that answers the question of whether the PS6 will have an awkward snap on disc drive.
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 13:28:06 UTC
to be fair, the "awkward snap-on disc drive" on ps5 isn't really awkward -- it's a one time install and is now indistinguishable from a built-in drive.
buran77 · 2026-07-01 12:45:51 UTC
Discs are less convenient so people have slowly moved to digital sales. This worked even better for console manufacturers, cheaper to drop that disc reader, and the second hand market is effectively dead which increases new game sales.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
fzeroracer · 2026-07-01 13:05:18 UTC
It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.
mittensc · 2026-07-01 13:36:07 UTC
> And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy.
EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.
Uvix · 2026-07-01 16:23:22 UTC
Or they’ll just stop “selling” copies in those territories and only allow short-term rentals or monthly subscription services.
cryptoegorophy · 2026-07-01 13:53:47 UTC
I remember joke “you will own nothing and will be happy”, it is less of a joke now.
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 14:11:19 UTC
It's from a 2016 essay. I'm not sure it was ever only a joke. I didn't even perceive it as a joke back then (unless you wanted to joke about companies being knobheads). It was already clear by then that that was the direction they wanted to go.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
fennecfoxy · 2026-07-01 13:55:58 UTC
And also quality.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:12:24 UTC
Most people really don't care, which is a shame. The sheer quality difference between a 4k digital movie and a 4k bluray is astounding. Hell, oftentimes a standard bluray looks better despite the lower resolution since it isn't being compressed
jeffbee · 2026-07-01 14:16:23 UTC
Even a well-mastered DVD can look better than online streaming.
fishgoesblub · 2026-07-01 14:18:34 UTC
> since it isn't being compressed
Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:21:43 UTC
Huh, I always thought they were uncompressed. That's why people preferred it over hd-dvd
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 14:37:12 UTC
Uncompressed 24-bit 1080p running at 24 FPS requires 1.192 Gbit/s, or 0.149 GByte/s. So a 25 GB (single-layer) blu-ray has enough space for a whopping 167.8 seconds of uncompressed 1080p video running at 24 FPS. You can double that with a dual-layer blu-ray, and there are more corners you can cut, but I don't think you'll fit your movie in there.
Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.
HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.
eska · 2026-07-01 15:05:48 UTC
I don’t think that you guys should be debating compressed vs uncompressed, but lossy compression vs lossless compression. Your math seems to derive from a naive storage format.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 15:12:09 UTC
Ah, that's what it was. I'm still half asleep, I didn't drink enough caffeine this morning haha
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 16:05:57 UTC
Blu-ray is lossy too. All video codecs of note that aren't for professionals are lossy, so the point mostly still stands. Lossless compression doesn't go very far when it comes to video.
An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.
Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.
rhinoceraptor · 2026-07-01 14:58:35 UTC
A 4K movie uncompressed would be something like two or three terabytes depending on the format. I think Arri are the only cinema cameras that can even shoot uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the rest shoot lossy compressed video in their native raw formats.
antisthenes · 2026-07-01 14:22:22 UTC
What's kind of an annoying side effect of this is that you have all this fancy new display tech, like quantum dot LED (marketing term, but w/e), or OLED, but it's all pointless because you're just watching it with crappy compression, negating the quality gains.
artisinal · 2026-07-01 16:26:14 UTC
The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.
rvz · 2026-07-01 12:46:30 UTC
Unsurprising. [0] This is even before 2030 and you will own nothing and be happy.
Get ready for your games to be delisted [1] as you never owned them in the first place (unless you have the disc)
Is that really enough? AFAIK many PC games with SecuROM won't ever work without crack, as that entire DRM is incompatible with modern OSes.
Wowfunhappy · 2026-07-01 13:06:02 UTC
It's enough on consoles.
On PC, discs (when they even exist, which is rare) have basically just been digital keys for a long time.
kuerbel · 2026-07-01 12:47:44 UTC
Aaaand I'm not going to buy a PS6.
On pc there is some competition at least between Steam, epic, gog (the odd one out but I like it) and such. I have no interest in buying a vendor specific computer with only one storefront and no competition.
Cthulhu_ · 2026-07-01 13:29:01 UTC
But those are still digital-only platforms, with a chance of them disappearing. Epic is the biggest risk there, I think.
GoG is an interesting case though, it has loads of games that by and large were available on physical media, but because said physical media is either gone, broken, or in the hands of collectors, getting a physical copy of those games is difficult now. Them being a digital platform re-enables people to play these games.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:16:06 UTC
GoG is also DRM free, so if GoG dies it's not like you'll lose access to your games. Even if you lose the files, archives will exist. Plus, if you're really that morally opposed to file sharing, you can always put it on a NAS or flash drive. Heck, put it on a bluray if you want to
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 13:29:23 UTC
It's important to note that that vendor specific computer is 1) cheaper then a PC that can play equivalent games, and 2) much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)
fluoridation · 2026-07-01 13:38:26 UTC
>cheaper then a PC that can play equivalent games
There are no savings to be had. What you don't pay one way you pay another.
>much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)
So do you not own a computer? How do you avoid dealing with those issues, otherwise?
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 13:50:56 UTC
I own several computers, and I use them for work. Running games on them means either running windows or running an emulation layer, and both solutions are unreliable messes. High end graphics cards are generally very expensive and have required binary-blobs that are really hard to troubleshoot, and (in my experience) always have problems.
If I want to play a video game, I turn on my PlayStation and it just works and I don't have to think about it or troubleshoot anything. This has not been my experience with PC gaming.
kuerbel · 2026-07-01 14:12:33 UTC
I exclusively play on Fedora if on pc and the only problem I had up to now was with the ps5 controller and some weird rumble input. That was easily fixed with some googling.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:18:08 UTC
Sidenote but why do you use a PS5 controller? I can understand if someone already has a console they'd prefer to use the controllers they already have, but I see so many PC gamers go out and buy a playstation or xbox controller when they want a controller when 8bitdo is right there and much better for the price
fluoridation · 2026-07-01 14:41:03 UTC
Not everyone wants to do research for every little purchase. XBox and PS controllers are likely to be at least good enough, if not the baseline of quality. A few weeks ago I got an XBox-compatible third party controller with Hall effect sticks, and while it's mostly alright, I found a weird issue where when I enter a specific mode in one game by holding the right trigger I have to have the stick centered or it doesn't register for about a second. This doesn't happen with MS's controller, and I have no idea how the input device can be causing something so specific.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 15:10:55 UTC
Do people genuinely not know about 8bitdo though? It doesn't take a lot of research if you're in a store or recommended it by amazon
kuerbel · 2026-07-01 16:18:22 UTC
Because I also own a ps5
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 14:43:12 UTC
See that's a great example. By the time I sit down to play a game, I don't want to be googling issues.
keyringlight · 2026-07-01 12:58:34 UTC
I wonder if this signals anything about Sony's attitude to blu-ray movies. Aside from games one of the reasons their consoles have sold well is because they've been excellent physical media players. The PS2 for DVDs and the PS3 onwards for blu-ray.
If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.
fredoralive · 2026-07-01 13:04:30 UTC
I’m not sure if Sony has been pushing their video disc formats with PlayStations for a while. PS4 Pro was the “4K” upgrade over PS4, but didn’t support UHD Blu-Ray. And there’s been a disc drive-less PS5 since launch.
Stuff like Blu-Ray seems to be becoming a Laserdisc like enthusiasts niche system, I don’t think it’s been a big thing for Sony for a while.
nsbk · 2026-07-01 12:59:43 UTC
Bummer! Based on the current trajectory, PS6 will be the first non-handheld PS I will not own.
jespinel · 2026-07-01 13:01:12 UTC
I thought CDs were (mostly) no longer being produced. I'm surprised this decision was not made years ago.
Shank · 2026-07-01 13:02:33 UTC
They're Blu-Ray discs.
bilekas · 2026-07-01 13:02:39 UTC
This is ridiculous, and not long after they've been updating their ToS to require you to sign in and phone home in order to continue to be allowed access to your digital library.
> In response to shifting trends in consumer preference.
I hate this corporate speak. If buying isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing.
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 13:33:16 UTC
> If buying isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing.
You're not buying a game, you're buying a license to play the game. If you don't agree with the terms, don't buy that license, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to commit copyright infringement.
If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
bilekas · 2026-07-01 13:54:56 UTC
There's an expectation that once the sale is finalised they should t be able to just take it back when they like. Agreements or not that's not how things are supposed to work.
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 14:24:21 UTC
> If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Good thing I don't recognise copyright. Can't infringe on that which does not exist. I'm sick of pretending it does good in the world when I constantly see its consequences are things like this.
> If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Given the amount of agreements out there that have unfair terms from the get go, or are otherwise Darth Vadered, why should anyone care what deal the corps give you?
bigfishrunning · 2026-07-01 14:45:21 UTC
If you don't like the deal, don't take it. It doesn't matter if you recognize copyright, it's the law. Some people don't recognize speed limits; that doesn't always end well for them.
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 14:50:23 UTC
> it's the law
I can ignore that too, you know. Not all laws are reasonable.
> Some people don't recognize speed limits; that doesn't always end well for them.
Breaking the speed limit can be lethal. That's a pretty good reason to follow that rule even if you don't care who made it.
I haven't found good reasons to keep copyright law (on the contrary, I constantly see it hinder progress in society), so I ignore it.
If I get prosecuted for doing copyright infringement, I'll take it with pride.
tacticalturtle · 2026-07-01 14:12:43 UTC
It’s not corporate speak - they have hard data in digital vs physical sales that they report on every quarter:
Even more reason to call this out, they know the exact figures they need to create physical copies of, they're claiming a complete trend to reduce their expenses. I don't believe they have some agenda to simply turn off games for people for no reason, but needing to check in every few months to keep a game active is actively hostile to the customer.
phire · 2026-07-01 13:06:36 UTC
With this news, I have to wonder how much longer bluray will live.
Will we continue seeing new bluray releases of movies and TV shows for decades, or are their days numbered?
The loss of console gaming presumably removes a guaranteed revenue source that was keeping Bluray pressing plants alive.
Sales of DVDs and Bluray have been declining for years [1][3]. Some people have been excited pushing the news that UHD bluray sales increased in 2025, [2] but that ignores the fact that the total optical sales still dropped.
I can't imagine content owners wanting the physical media to continue any longer than they can get away with. The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful. At least as long as everyone continues to buy into their DRM systems.
I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort
phire · 2026-07-01 13:37:11 UTC
That's part of what I was thinking. The idea of digital-only must be very attractive for content owners, so I don't think they will put much effort into preventing that outcome.
ktallett · 2026-07-01 13:26:14 UTC
They won't be releasing new Blu Rays for decades. Outside of collectors, why would they? Unless there is a hidden market for the discs elsewhere it's not worth it
bakies · 2026-07-01 13:51:44 UTC
Libraries :(
NathanielK · 2026-07-01 14:12:34 UTC
My local library never made the jump to Blu-Ray and still only has DVDs. They have physical copies of video games too though.
kuerbel · 2026-07-01 13:36:09 UTC
Collecting is going strong, though. My husband collects physical media, and media books, including a booklet and a nice cover, sell very well. As are special editions of more mainstream movies. Give people something extra and they will gladly buy it. I'd have expected them to go down that path, sell nice steelbooks, media books with an included art book and so on. Add a blu ray with interviews about the development process and so on. I'd pay good money for that and others would as well. Even if they sell the console only with an external disk drive.
miiiiiike · 2026-07-01 13:39:51 UTC
I saw my first Dolby Vision Blu-ray and immediately started a Blu-Ray collection. The Blu-ray player on the PS5 is fine, but a nice dedicated player from Sony blows it away.
I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Purest Feeling?
kuerbel · 2026-07-01 13:47:37 UTC
>dedicated player from Sony blows it away
If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar.
My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:10:00 UTC
You can still buy CDs. They don't come with music videos usually but they sound greatr
maherbeg · 2026-07-01 16:18:38 UTC
What's better about the dedicated player out of curiosity?
Telaneo · 2026-07-01 13:57:37 UTC
Even if Sony keeps a token factory or two open to produce blu-rays, I'd imagine we'll see fewer and fewer new releases. Maybe we'll only see them as part of collector's sets that have enough margin to afford a cut of the more limited supply.
This feels like the beginning of the death spiral for blu-ray. Sales aren't going to go up enough for it to be worth it keep factories going, much less spin up new ones.
jonhohle · 2026-07-01 14:02:22 UTC
Years ago I did a podcast[0] on physical media and hypothesized UHD would be the last physical movie format (and was shocked that it was even a thing).
The next two years are probably going to be a mess as collectors snatch everything up annd inventory gets cleared out.
UHD bluray isn't really a new physical format. It's the exact same physical format as regular bluray. They didn't change a thing except move some previously optional parts of the bluray spec (like three layer discs, and 33GB per layer) to being compulsory.
I don't think we have ever seen something like it before. A new media format that breaks backwards compatibility, yet uses the exact same physical medium as the previous version. Some people did attempt it with HD movies on DVD, but the attempt failed so badly I don't think it even counts.
Its very existence was a very strong signal Bluray would be the last optical disc format. And the launch of the PS5 without a new optical confirmed it.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:10:53 UTC
I honestly doubt they'll stop. Sony is a Japanese company, and they seem to still enjoy buying blurays
Teever · 2026-07-01 16:24:08 UTC
But is there enough of a market for blu-rays of newer western releases in Japan to keep the entire production and distribution chain alive around the rest of the world?
everdrive · 2026-07-01 16:20:55 UTC
I think blu-ray will live for quite a while, but will be a bit like vinyl; there will be a consistent, niche market.
pryelluw · 2026-07-01 13:14:33 UTC
Guess I’m throwing my PS5 out the window and going to PC. This war on physical media is ridiculous. Pretty soon they’re going to require us to buy the console but rent the controllers for the very low price of $79.99 a month.
functionmouse · 2026-07-01 13:22:45 UTC
steam games don't have discs either
the real problem here isn't lack of plastic circles
callamdelaney · 2026-07-01 14:00:16 UTC
Valve have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy unlike say, Sony and Microsoft. If there are no disks then there is no point in consoles in my view, they're just worse computers.
mghackerlady · 2026-07-01 14:07:41 UTC
plus, nothings stopping you from distributing a physical PC game. Heck, iirc steam still supports it. Even if it didn't, you could still buy a physical PC anyway since they can just have an exe, flatpak/snap/appimage, or dmg
Comments
But at the end of the day, part of what makes a console a console to me is the ability to swap games with friends. If I can't do that easily, why wouldn't I just use Steam?
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745476
And even if true, there's always emulation (also a pain though).
I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346
Consumers are lured into walled-gardens all the time - consoles, app stores, hardware. Where would you suggest someone purchase a digital license for a movie?
From a video game store is the part I find odd. I get walled gardens. Not this one for this purpose.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.
Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.
HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.
An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.
Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.
Get ready for your games to be delisted [1] as you never owned them in the first place (unless you have the disc)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362792
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32049626
Don’t buy their consoles and games
Is that really enough? AFAIK many PC games with SecuROM won't ever work without crack, as that entire DRM is incompatible with modern OSes.
On PC, discs (when they even exist, which is rare) have basically just been digital keys for a long time.
On pc there is some competition at least between Steam, epic, gog (the odd one out but I like it) and such. I have no interest in buying a vendor specific computer with only one storefront and no competition.
GoG is an interesting case though, it has loads of games that by and large were available on physical media, but because said physical media is either gone, broken, or in the hands of collectors, getting a physical copy of those games is difficult now. Them being a digital platform re-enables people to play these games.
There are no savings to be had. What you don't pay one way you pay another.
>much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)
So do you not own a computer? How do you avoid dealing with those issues, otherwise?
If I want to play a video game, I turn on my PlayStation and it just works and I don't have to think about it or troubleshoot anything. This has not been my experience with PC gaming.
If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.
Stuff like Blu-Ray seems to be becoming a Laserdisc like enthusiasts niche system, I don’t think it’s been a big thing for Sony for a while.
> In response to shifting trends in consumer preference.
I hate this corporate speak. If buying isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing.
You're not buying a game, you're buying a license to play the game. If you don't agree with the terms, don't buy that license, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to commit copyright infringement.
If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Good thing I don't recognise copyright. Can't infringe on that which does not exist. I'm sick of pretending it does good in the world when I constantly see its consequences are things like this.
> If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Given the amount of agreements out there that have unfair terms from the get go, or are otherwise Darth Vadered, why should anyone care what deal the corps give you?
I can ignore that too, you know. Not all laws are reasonable.
> Some people don't recognize speed limits; that doesn't always end well for them.
Breaking the speed limit can be lethal. That's a pretty good reason to follow that rule even if you don't care who made it.
I haven't found good reasons to keep copyright law (on the contrary, I constantly see it hinder progress in society), so I ignore it.
If I get prosecuted for doing copyright infringement, I'll take it with pride.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-just-reported-a-new-r...
Will we continue seeing new bluray releases of movies and TV shows for decades, or are their days numbered?
The loss of console gaming presumably removes a guaranteed revenue source that was keeping Bluray pressing plants alive.
Sales of DVDs and Bluray have been declining for years [1] [3]. Some people have been excited pushing the news that UHD bluray sales increased in 2025, [2] but that ignores the fact that the total optical sales still dropped.
[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
[3] This article has a more complete graph: https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-slight-r...
I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort
I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Purest Feeling?
If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar.
My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...
This feels like the beginning of the death spiral for blu-ray. Sales aren't going to go up enough for it to be worth it keep factories going, much less spin up new ones.
The next two years are probably going to be a mess as collectors snatch everything up annd inventory gets cleared out.
0 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cherry-bombs-the-under...
I don't think we have ever seen something like it before. A new media format that breaks backwards compatibility, yet uses the exact same physical medium as the previous version. Some people did attempt it with HD movies on DVD, but the attempt failed so badly I don't think it even counts.
Its very existence was a very strong signal Bluray would be the last optical disc format. And the launch of the PS5 without a new optical confirmed it.
the real problem here isn't lack of plastic circles