Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers a Giant Middle Finger ⇥ kotaku.com

Ethan Gach, Kotaku:

It’s been almost a month since Sony announced the end of PlayStation discs for new games starting in 2028, and a loud contingent of angry fans has continued to criticize the company for going all-digital. Asked about the ongoing backlash during its latest earnings call, Sony said it understands why people have strong feelings about physical games, but it’s still going to move forward with getting rid of them.

“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao said through an interpreter during a Q&A on July 31. “It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing.”

Via Timothy Geigner, at Techdirt:

No concern for preservation efforts. No concern for the 20% or so customers who still want to buy physical media. No concern for any brick and mortar retail partners and what will happen to them.

It appears Sony is going to listen to anyone but its own customers on this one.

In pure market forces terms, Sony is arguably listening to the overwhelming majority of its customers by moving to a digital-only distribution strategy. Most people will not notice, at least in the short-term, that they can only acquire new games through downloading them and agreeing to some onerous digital rights restrictions. None of that matters until Sony has more licensing disagreements or shuts off some servers. But then it will matter.

We need government agencies that actually take seriously these kinds of power transfers and advocate for consumer rights. There should at least be a time-based limit to how long DRM can protect something, after which it should be possible to keep a wholly local copy to the greatest possible extent.