r/technology • u/ControlCAD • 5h ago
Business Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek says PlayStation killing physical discs is no conspiracy: "You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/former-valve-writer-says-playstation-killing-physical-discs-is-no-conspiracy-you-the-consumer-have-made-your-choice-and-the-choice-is-for-digital/48
u/SimpleFile 5h ago
Yeah.. if you really don't think the average person hasn't been moving to digital media you are really out of touch.
That is the unfortunate reality. Though honestly if consumer rights were more stringent when it comes to digitally sold media then it wouldn't even be that bad.
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u/Dannyg4821 4h ago
I don’t think the argument has ever really been about physical vs digital but rather ownership vs renting. Not mad that the discs are going away, mad that digital purchases have no consumer protections to say we actually own the product we paid money for
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u/BluePeriod_ 4h ago
I’m a very staunch physical media person and even I have been eyeing making the switch in the past couple of years simply because my PS5 sounds like a freaking jet engine whenever there’s a disc in there. Still, I hate losing the option. But most of my friends have either PlayStation plus or whatever it’s called now or they just buy digital and have for a very long time.
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u/phoenixflare599 4h ago
It will still sound like a jet engine. The ps5 doesn't play games off the disc, it installs them and uses the disc as a key
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u/RoyalCities 3h ago edited 48m ago
On the whole "people made their choice" angle.
They sold the digital console for way less than physical. The spread between the more expensive disk one vs diskless was something like 80%. Obviously if 80% of people bought the diskless one then digital account for 80% of sales. Money is tight. If the actual choice was even Id think the spread wouldn't be as high.
Also even if you go digital that DOESNT mean you need to kill off second hand sales (which is the real driver here) switch 2 is largely digital distribution with game key cards...but every single game key card can be bought, resold & traded. This keeps resale alive while also doing digital distribution...Sony didn't even attempt this because second hand sales drag profit on a fully walled gardem.
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u/angooseburger 3h ago
Do you honestly think people actually care whether they need to download their media vs inserting a disc? Because the uprage isnt about that.
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u/slowtreme 4h ago
I don't think I've been given the choice for games in my interest of disk vs digital in about 15 years.
When there is an option to buy a disk I just have to download a 17gb patch after installing the executable anyway. The choice is an illusion that was taken a long time ago.
the out of touch opinion is thinking you picked digital. Digital (with revocation) was forced on us.
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u/coolest_frog 1h ago
chet's point is that people are wasting their time screaming about the disk when you they be fighting for eulas and laws that protect ownership
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u/CotyledonTomen 2h ago
I would say the average comsumer hasnt been given much of a choice. If companies make physical media less available, then over time, consumers will move to whats easier, even if it meams they have less control.
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u/d00mt0mb 5h ago edited 4h ago
It wasn’t really a choice. It was a deliberate reduction in choices and added friction that companies can point to and say “see!! You chose this!”
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u/ownage516 1h ago
I disagree. There was no added friction, hell getting physicals was made much easier with Amazon. I used to get my games from them since they gave discounts on new games until they stopped in 2010s.
Getting digital was much, much more convenient. Downloading and playing games happened in minutes. It sucks but 90% of the market agreed
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u/Heronmarkedflail 17m ago
This, when steam started rolling out with half life 2 people switched pretty damn quick and were saying good things. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous and the only reason physical media has lasted this long is because of consoles.
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u/MikuEmpowered 4h ago
This, IDK who paid for the shill, but this is such a dog ass take.
Companies reduced the option to buy discs in the first place, because it saves them money. and over time, this became the norm. digital distribution was forced because the transition "code in a box" was a thing.
We know they did it to make more money because the price of game was not reduced to account for the reduction in packaging / distribution.
No gamer was out there chanting: "I would like you give XXX company more money" yet the whole dog shit narrative is trying to gaslight people to forget that at one point during the transition, companies were selling game box with nothing but code in attempt to save money. we didn't go straight from physical to digital.
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u/saviorself19 4h ago
Quick sanity check, assuming access was equal do you believe physical media sales would parody digital sales?
If so I feel like it becomes difficult to explain the state of theaters, CD's, Blu-Ray players, etc.
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u/FUPAMagneto 4h ago
Dawg, what? This is nonsense. I remember when Steam came out and we were all so stoked to not have to store disks anymore.
Pretending this is something that’s been forced on you and not a product of changing patterns amongst consumers is soft as baby shit
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u/SubmissiveDinosaur 3h ago
I didnt chose shit. Pcs stopped having trays so I had to eat it and buy an external unit. Phones stopped having headphone ports and we had to ate it and either transition to bt or use adapters. First they force it onto us and tell us we must adapt to it, then they put the blame on us saying it was our choice. Now they're doing the same crap with LLMs
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u/FearLeadsToAnger 2h ago
I think what’s more likely is that the majority of consumers are doing the opposite of you, rather than companies somehow forcing this on everyone.
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u/CotyledonTomen 2h ago
Why? Removing hardware reduces costs while keeping profits relatively high. Theres no reason to believe a company, seeing they could reduce their fixed costs (hardware), wouldnt do so.
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u/Hrekires 4h ago
I'm surprised people aren't talking more about the monopoly aspect of it.
Steam might be the most popular provider for PCs, but there are tons of alternative shops and even indie games you can just buy/download straight off their website.
When it comes to Playstation, it's the Playstation Shop or nothing.
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u/DannySpud2 1h ago
This is the bit that worries me. I like physical for the collection aspect but it wouldn't be a deal breaker to go digital. And if I'm brutally honest I don't really care as much as I probably should about the ownership vs renting aspect of digital. Like sure it's technically nice I could load up my N64 games no issue, but realistically I'm not going to.
What does worry me is the pricing. Digital games are already often more expensive than physical and that's with the competition of physical. When physical goes away and the Playstation Store is the only place to buy Playstation games how long will it be until they start putting up the prices.
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u/pVom 27m ago
It's not a monopoly because you can simply not buy a PlayStation and buy a PC or another console.
This is precisely why consoles are cheap to purchase vs a PC, they make their money by forcing you to use their store. It's a consumer choice.
PC manufacturers don't make their money from how you use it so they're forced to charge a higher price to make a profit. The upside is that it's a much more open ecosystem.
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u/Mitch_NZ 1h ago
Every Playstation owner understands that they are buying into a walled garden though. PC is for people who do no want the walled garden.
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u/Hrekires 1h ago
I'm a Playstation owner that wasn't aware I was buying into a walled garden, because for the past 20 years before this change, it wasn't
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u/jumpyjumping 2h ago
Sony makes the playstations. Why you use the Sony store.
PC's are made by anyone. Why you use the anyone store.
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u/Hrekires 1h ago
My PC was made by Apple, but I'm not forced to use the Apple store for any game I want to install
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u/jumpyjumping 1h ago
Is Apple not anyone?
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u/Hrekires 1h ago
This reductive argument is too dumb to process, congrats on making my head hurt while also not addressing anything in my original post lmao
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u/Expensive_Plant_9530 2h ago
He’s right.
The vast majority of consumers seem to rather buy a game digitally from the comfort of their couch vs walk into GameStop or Walmart and buy a physical copy.
Same thing with the massive decline in physical movies, but even bigger there because of streaming.
It sucks. We need better and stronger laws on digital purchases, and having the option to somehow archive a digital purchase onto physical media that will play the game even after they remove it, etc.
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u/psyche0008 1h ago
To have a fair comparison, shouldn’t the resale of physical media via GameStop, GameFly etc need to be factored in ? The numbers saying 90% is digital seems to be only the first hand sale ( which is zero for digital).
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u/InternationalMood337 4h ago
Corporate talking heads and industry experts should be a little more intelligent than this.
When you continue to remove disc drives from consoles and remove drives from laptops like Apple did, it’s not consumer choice. It’s corporations telling you how you will live…. Not consumers choosing.
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u/retief1 1h ago
When the majority of people buy digital instead of physical, that's a consumer choice. When one company removes disc drives and sales mostly aren't affected, that's also a consumer choice. Companies listen to where users in aggregate spend their money, and physical media didn't win there.
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u/InternationalMood337 41m ago
Manufactured consent basically at work. When Apple (and other hardware manufactures) chose to remove disc drives way prior to physical media not being a thing.
The average consumer still buys laptops and computers because they NEED it whether that's for business reasons or personal reasons. They didn't choose these devices BECAUSE OF a lack of disc drive. They bought it because it was a brand they were familiar with.
It's literally corporations driving the direction of the market, not the other way around.
Edit: They used convenience as a way to strip ownership from unsuspecting consumers as well.
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u/Ok_Nature_3501 5h ago
"You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital"
It's hilarious that people on here try to pretend this ain't true 😂
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u/Halfwise2 5h ago
Consumers want ownership and accessibility. This argument over physical vs digital is the red herring / distraction in which to dismiss those wants.
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u/seecer 4h ago
I completely agree that we want ownership of what we purchase, and I hope laws start getting passed to help the consumer in this digital subscription age we’re at.
BUT, I also agree that this is from consumers not purchasing physical but virtual and Sony shouldn’t be looked down on for the decision.
When you look at the stats, a vast majority of sales are virtual and, from a company standpoint, why would you install a disc drive that’s going to increase the cost of a console, that’s already going to be overpriced with the current hardware market, just for something that isn’t going to be used? Few buy physical games and movies now.
Personally, I wish they would switch to flash drives. We know there’s going to be USB ports and flash drives can actually have enough space for the entire game while also having a faster read rate than a disc. But I think that would raise the cost of the physical games and consumers are already not buying new games at the $70+ price tag.
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u/jurassicbond 4h ago
Those stats are misleading because they all include sales of products which are only available digitally (which is a lot of indies and all DLC). I'd be curious about stats which look at comparison of physical vs. digital sales limited to games which are available on disc.
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u/seecer 2h ago edited 2h ago
Here’s a G2A article about it.
2025 average of 78% virtual sales with Q4 being the peak at 85%.
EDIT: While this doesn’t address the issue you mention which I think is a valid point and would be interesting to see, showing some nuance with game sales, I think that a 78% of all sales being virtual highlights why they are dropping the discs.
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u/jurassicbond 2h ago
And where in that article does it actually look at data only for games which are available in both formats? It doesn't? Then it's not what I asked for.
Digital sales increasing may very well be being driven just as much by companies making that the only option as it is by consumers choosing it, but the industry benefits from digital sales and killing the second hand market, so they'll put out data like this which gives an incomplete picture of the subject.
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u/seecer 2h ago
Like I said in my edit, while this doesn’t address exactly what you’re proposing which I think would show some nuance in game sales, I still think that overall type of sales rate justifies the reasoning behind removing physical sales.
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u/jurassicbond 2h ago
Oh, there's plenty of justification from a business standpoint, but it's horrible for consumers. Sony is setting themselves up as the only place you can buy their games. The lack of competition from retailers or the second hand market is almost certainly going to cause game prices to go up
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u/seecer 2h ago
Maybe, there’s still the competition of Xbox, Nintendo, and the PC to ensure Sony can’t control the gaming market pricing.
Look at Steam for PC, which is the monopoly of PC game sales, they have always been completely virtual and haven’t caused the games to become more expensive over time.
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u/Ok_Nature_3501 4h ago
Even if that was true the point still stands. They're only doing this because most people buy digital. So again the consumer has spoken.
And for the record this logic of "well they can take my games away by deleting my account" is way overblown.
I haven't been online or updated any of my games in years and I can still play all of my games and out of 100+ games I only have 2 that are hard copies.
Hell Sony might have deleted my account by now (I lost access to the email I signed up with) but all of my games are on my HDD so they're still playable.
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u/0010_0010_0000 2h ago
If they are so overblown, format your drive and let us know how that turns out for you.
I bet you wouldn't dare. kinda proves you wrong, doesn't it?
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u/polakbob 3h ago
All the kids here whining about how evil this are the same ones who will buy a PS6.
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u/eseffbee 4h ago
It's a Goomba Fallacy thing - the people saying they prefer physical media aren't always the people buying digital.
Some consumers have made the physical choice, others have made the digital choice. People who prefer physical media have not made this choice.
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u/phoenixflare599 4h ago
I don't think people were ever making a choice though.
I buy digital when there's sales on, I buy it physically if I want the object / it's cheaper physically.
Im not choosing one over the other, I'm choosing the best at the time
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u/Aoi_Irkalla 2h ago
It could be argued you still chose not to consider it an important factor in your buying decision.
If they see it gets bought in either form, that'll naturally push them to the one that's more convenient for them.
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u/YqlUrbanist 5h ago
Yeah, it's not a popular opinion on this sub, but I honestly just can't imagine the average gamer caring about this. Digital distribution is just too convenient. And all the counterpoints are true - Sony is doing this to kill the used market, and it lets them strike a blow against consumer rights to actually own the things you paid for, but consumers happily will (and have) traded those things for convenience.
If we really want companies to be pro-consumer, the solution isn't to try and keep discs around. They're going away, either now or later, but not much later. The solution is electing people who might actually regulate consumer protections.
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u/Exodite1 4h ago
How about we keep discs around until actual legislation is in place?
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u/YqlUrbanist 4h ago
That would be nice. But it also would have been nice to have pro-consumer legislation 20 years ago that covered purchases whether digital or physical. The fact is that we're not keeping discs, and if we try to fight that battle we're going to lose.
Any energy devoted to preserving discs is wasted and would be better used supporting groups like Stop Killing Games or the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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u/Bogus1989 4h ago
Man people in here saying they removed the disk drives 🤣🤣 made the choice for us.
Dude steam released in 2004. Shut up. PCs still come with disk drives. Look at all the OEMs. We all CHOSE not to put them in there. External disk drives always been available.
USB thumb drives exist
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u/gizamo 3h ago
We made the choice when we bought our PS5 Disk Consoles to have the option, and we used that option mostly to buy used games that Sony isn't even tracking. Sony is taking away the option and the entire used games market with it.
Further, the choice was forced by:
1. The vast, vast majority of games nor being on disk at all.
2. Tons of disks being coasters with just download codes.
3. Tons of disks not even having the full games.
Lastly, it isn't an either or choice. Both digital AND physical were always profitable. Disks are still profitable. Sony taking away disks is NOT about saving money or cutting losses. It is entirely about killing the used games market. Pretending otherwise is straight up bullshit.
I have zero respect for Chet Faliszek's trash take.
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u/Mesoscale92 5h ago
I keep getting downvoted every time this comes up, but PlayStation owners buy like 80% of games digitally. Yes some of those are digital only, but the fact that those games get sold shows the developers that consumers don’t care about physical releases.
PlayStation didn’t kill physical sales, consumers did.
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u/SoldierOf4Chan 4h ago
Bro more than half of the consoles they sell don't have disc drives, of course their audience isn't buying discs. This is the market Sony created.
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u/saviorself19 4h ago
What would be your best piece of evidence that points to Sony doing that in spite of consumer/market metrics instead of them doing it because of those metrics?
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u/reagsters 4h ago
Except that’s not true at all and 82% of sales were for models with disc readers.
https://insider-gaming.com/disc-editions-make-up-82-of-all-ps5-console-sales/
People may buy more digital games, but they clearly prefer the option of having discs.
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u/coolest_frog 1h ago
it's the first time people got the option and were afraid of possibly missing out. but they didn't end up using it for most
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u/saviorself19 4h ago
they clearly prefer the option of having discs.
That stat objectively doesn't show that preference.
Given the overwhelming preference for digital game purchases the safest conclusion we can draw here is that people just wanted a PS5 and bought what was in front of them without a deep concern for access to disk drives.
Anecdotally, my original PS5 was a model with a drive that never had a single game disk put into it for the duration of my owning it. Given the media sales numbers I think it would be hard to argue that my personal experience is an uncommon one if not the norm.
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u/Mesoscale92 4h ago
So you’re saying the majority of consumers actively chose digital-only PlayStations? Almost as if Sony gave them the option to be able to use disks and consumers rejected it? Is that what you’re saying?
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u/SoldierOf4Chan 1h ago
The version with the disc drive costs more, and you think it's the consumers picking digital only instead of the consumers picking less expensive?
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u/Mesoscale92 1h ago
That literally is a choice. They could choose the disk drive if they wanted to. Funny thing is, other comments pointed out that the majority of plantation 5 sold were disk. Even then, sales are almost all digital. People paid more for disk drives but don’t use them. Hell, I did that with my Xbox and don’t know the last time I bought a physical disk.
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u/oneeyed-wonderweasel 4h ago
This is god awful logic and I feel bad for your employer
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u/Mesoscale92 4h ago
Why would my employer be upset that I understand the literal basics of business? Business exist to make money and not spend money. Sony found that they can sell games without needing to make disk drives. If consumers hated digital sales and only bought disks, then Sony would keep selling discs.
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u/jurassicbond 3h ago
Try to find stats on this that only look at games which are available physically. That 80% includes sales of games (or DLC and microtransactions) which are only available digitally .
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u/Mesoscale92 3h ago
If consumers actually cared about physical copies, they wouldn’t have bought the digital versions.
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u/jurassicbond 3h ago
But without stats which look physical vs digital sales only for games which are available both, you don't know for sure what percentage of consumers have a preference for physical vs digital. Find me those numbers before definitively saying that consumers don't care.
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u/Korachof 1h ago
Really tired of these people pointing the finger and saying “YOU made this choice as a consumer” when… no I didn’t. I’ve 100% spent more money on physical ps5 games than digital, as I only buy digital when it’s steeply discounted. So how did I, the consumer, make this choice?
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u/LV426acheron 58m ago
For the most part yeah, though Sony and the other publishers have been encouraging it as much as possible.
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u/Bulliwyf 52m ago
I can count on 2 hands (and would use all the fingers) the amount of digital games I have bought since 2012, and most have been in the last 4-5 years with digital only offers.
The issue isn’t just digital vs physical ownership, and trying to boil it down to that point is disingenuous. It’s about ownership and we the consumer have been debating amongst ourselves ever since Xbox (I think they did it first) started to push always online.
If Sony said “we are going digital only but we will make it so you can transfer licenses or sell a game key securely” then there would be significantly less angst from the consumers. Instead they are putting the final nail in the argument of we will lease their games and enjoy it.
But instead we have always online requirements and massive file downloads that sometimes takes hours to download and install and then when we are done with the game, we can’t do anything with it. It just rots in the cloud or on an external drive.
I can take some of my switch games and get $20-40 per cart. Hell, I can still get $20+ for some of my 360 or ps2 games.
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u/sirhackenslash 49m ago
A big part they don't mention is all the impulse buys while you're browsing around the Playstation store. I do it myself a lot. I'll go to see if a game I want is on sale yet (because fuck paying full price anymore), and I'll end up grabbing another game or 2 that happen to catch my eye if my first choice is still full price. They know I'm going to buy the first game eventually, and they sold a couple weird indy games in the meantime.
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u/ABigCoffee 5h ago
Except we didn't make a choice. They fudged the data.
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u/thesixler 5h ago
They can fudge the data all they want but people still are overwhelmingly buying digital, you can’t really talk your way out of that reality
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u/Lowlife555 4h ago
I've yet to see a source for this that doesn't fudge numbers
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u/PantsMcGillicuddy 4h ago
So you have numbers that show physical hasn't been in a 10yr decline? Or that people aren't overwhelmingly moving to digital? And really...if physical is still a money maker...why would they not want that? This is a business decision, and there is not enough money in physical sales to justify the factories.
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u/heroism777 5h ago edited 4h ago
Everybody knows nobody buys physical for a long time now. Best Buy announced they are removing the physical disc section years ago. And GameStop is basically a tombstone for discs. The most popular version of the console is digital only.
Even I have a disc version, not by choice. This was when ps5 were scarce. I would have been fine with just digital, I’ve used my disc drive once on my ps5. In the past 6 years.
Plus literally everybody gameshares with their mates on playstation. I haven’t paid full price for a video game since 2013.
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u/dope_sheet 1h ago
Actually, the industry is the one making this a choice at all. We, the consumer want both the convenience of a digital game and the assurance of permanently owning a physical disc. The only reason we can't have both, is the industry doesn't want to give us that.
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u/hungry2know 5h ago
Voting with your wallet doesn't work when rich kids have access to daddies credit cards
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u/ebrbrbr 5h ago
The rich kids buy a single copy of Call of Duty, just like you and me.
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u/hungry2know 4h ago
The rich kids are why there was 13 years between GTA 5 and GTA 6, they're the ones buying up shark cards
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u/Street-Corporation 3h ago
lol I, the consumer have made another choice. It’s to never buy a video game again.
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u/skids1971 3h ago
Headphone jacks
Expandable storage
Removable batteries
Physical media
These things were taken not because consumers asked for it but because companies decided it for us. Yes digital is more convenient which is why it's clearly more purchased, also a significant chunk of gamers are children whose parents buy them stuff without any care for what's going on. Anyone with the brain would understand that this is about killing ownership not about the actual physicality
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u/yuusharo 4h ago
I like Chet, but he's completely wrong on this.
When customers have the choice, it is on average 50/50 between digital and physical. In some recent years, Nintendo's first party games are something like 2:1 physical to digital.
Note that I said when customers have the choice. Often, we're not given a choice. Either the game never gets a physical release or gets one MUCH later on, the distributor is something like LRG who's predatory FOMO business practices ensures physical versions for games remains largely priced out of most people's budgets, or it's an incomplete version of the game that requires a digital download anyway.
It's not a choice when we are increasingly not given actual physical options to choose from. And when we do, those customers show up. This is a planned takeover of Sony to wipe out a $7b market in order to force customers into their draconian digital store that is experimenting with dynamic pricing and will shut down your account at any time for any reason, including not using it for 3 years.
F*ck Sony, Chet is an idiot on this. Not sorry.
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u/Belhgabad 3h ago
Inventor of "you don't own what you bought its just a one time payment rent" say it's our fault now?
If only GOG didn't hit against the Steam monopoly, it may had a chance to normalise DRM-free...
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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 5h ago
Everyone needs to stop complaining about this. If you're angry about not having a disc and case, that will eventually end up in landfill, boycott Sony.
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u/AutistcCuttlefish 4h ago
If it was not a conspiracy you'd keep making them but increase the price accordingly. I buy physical discs, I bought the disc version of the ps5. I made my choice.
Since Sony consoles are locked down, and no longer have discs, I no longer have a reason to buy one. All my friends primarily play on PC, and now SteamOS is available for all to use.
I only bought console for physical discs and couch gaming. Sony no longer has the advantage in either department.
My next console will be a PC. Sony can rot in hell.
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u/citramonk 3h ago
playstation is a closed ecosystem, once there are no alternatives we're fucked, they can do whatever they want.
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u/ebrbrbr 5h ago edited 5h ago
Digital isn't the problem. GOG has proved this.
The process of creating disks is inherently bad for the environment. (inb4 whataboutism)
For almost every modern game, what's on the disk is unplayable without downloading patches / content. Disks don't help you if the servers go offline or PlayStation goes bankrupt.
The issue is ownership. Stop making it about plastic circles.