A Cheaper Console Won't Buy Back What Losing PS5 Discs Costs Us

So the disc-drive debate has a new voice, and it's coming from the top of Ubisoft. During a recent investor Q&A, boss Yves Guillemot was asked about Sony's decision to stop producing discs for new PS5 games from January 2028, and instead of piling on the worry, he pointed to a silver lining: consoles without a disc drive are cheaper to build, and that can mean cheaper boxes for the rest of us.

And honestly? On pure hardware math, he's got a point. A drive is moving parts, licensing, extra cost. Strip it out and Sony can shave the price or pour that money into the actual guts of the machine. We've already seen it - the Digital Edition PS5 has quietly been the cheaper option this whole generation. So if the endgame is a slimmer, friendlier price tag for newcomers and families, I'm not going to pretend that means nothing.

But here's where I gently dig my heels in.

Cheaper isn't the same as fair

The thing a disc gives you isn't just a cheaper checkout - it's ownership. A physical copy is yours to lend to a friend, trade in when you're done, buy secondhand for half price, or dust off in fifteen years without asking a server's permission. That's the part no rebate covers. Save a few euros on the console and then lose the ability to ever resell or hand down a single game? For a lot of players, especially the ones counting every euro, that math doesn't actually come out ahead.

And I keep coming back to preservation. Servers go dark. Storefronts get delisted. We've watched it happen. A shelf of discs is a little library that survives all of that; a digital-only future asks you to trust that the game you paid for will still be there, and still be downloadable, whenever you feel like playing it.

To be clear, none of this is Sony being uniquely villainous. They've said the shift follows where players already are - nearly four in five full-game purchases on PlayStation last year were digital. The disc was already fading on its own. And nothing changes for the games you already own or anything landing before 2028. This is about the door quietly closing after that.

What I'd love is for the industry to hold both thoughts at once. Yes, make the cheap, sleek, drive-free console for people who genuinely never touch a disc - that's a real audience and they deserve a good deal. But don't frame the disappearance of physical ownership as a gift wrapped in a discount. A cheaper console is nice. Being allowed to actually own the games I buy is nicer, and I'm not quite ready to trade one for the other.

Image: PiaCarrot / CC BY-SA 3.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CD-ROM_for_PlayStation.jpg