Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear and director of the recent Death Stranding series, is one of gaming’s most famous developers and one of the first to react publicly to the recent news that Sony will be killing off PlayStation game discs in 2028. He was speaking at the Il Cinema in Piazza film festival in Italy when the topic of physical media came up and the dangers of an all-streaming future.
“Since production is ending in 2028, this is about video games, but I grew up with physical media, so I find it really sad,” Kojima said, according to a translation of his remarks by the only gaming news account Genki. “Currently, I’ve been buying up a lot of Blu-rays, such as various movies, and CDs too.”
He reportedly continued:
The situation is different for games, as they are downloaded to the hard drive, that means the game data remains on your own hardware. However, if things shift to streaming in the future, that won’t be the case anymore. With streaming subscription services, like Netflix or Amazon, there is a server somewhere, and you essentially just have the right to turn the tap, and when you do, the data flows out. That’s how movies work on these platforms, right? You don’t download the data, you access it directly through a subscription.
And the consequence of that is that you don’t actually possess the data yourself. There are companies that own these servers and let you ‘turn the tap’ for a monthly fee. However, with nations, politics and various ways of thinking, one naturally has to consider the possibility that if there is a change, the data inside will stop being distributed. And if that happens you won’t be able to watch or play the movies and games you like. That is what is frightening. So, what is happening to video games in 2028, might also happen to movies. I’d like everyone to keep that in mind.
The news that Sony will end physical media around the time its PlayStation 6 console generation is expected to launch has reignited concerns around ownership and the sorts of restrictions that digital-only purchases place on fans and players. Just recently, Sony removed movies from users’ digital libraries that they’d already purchased after license agreements expired. In the past, the platform holder has also shown that it can remove games from users’ libraries as well, like it did when Concord was “unlaunched” back in 2024. Fans have even been going back through PlayStation’s terms of service to comb through language that could see unused accounts potentially deleted altogether if they remain inactive for too long.
The debate saw Kojima’s own tweets about digital ownership from back in 2021 re-emerge this week. “Eventually, even digital data will no longer be owned by individuals on their own initiative,” he wrote. “Whenever there is a major change or accident in the world, in a country, in a government, in an idea, in a trend, access to it may suddenly be cut off. We will not be able to freely access the movies, books, and music that we have loved. I would be a have-not. That’s what I’m afraid of. This is not greed.”
Different gaming companies are responding to the shift to digital in different ways. It remains unclear if the PS6 will ship with an optional optical drive in order to allow players who own PS4 and PS5 discs to still play them on the new device (assuming it’s backward compatible). Microsoft is reportedly testing ways for existing users to digitize their physical game purchases so that they can access digital versions of those games moving forward, with many analysts expecting Xbox to ditch physical media in the future as well. Nintendo, meanwhile, has responded with game key cards, a controversial form of physical media that is locked by DRM and functions more as a transferable download code than an actual game cartridge. Still, it offers advantages over a digital-only purchase, including the ability to resell it or trade it with a friend.
While some have remained hopeful that Sony might reverse course, there’s already a report that at least one factory that primarily printed PlayStation discs is already pivoting to different products.
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