Sony is killing the disc in 2028. GOG just reminded PC players we never needed one.

January 2028. That's when Sony stops making game discs, and the thing that struck me isn't the date - it's how little anyone actually flinched. We all saw it coming. The disc has been a legacy checkbox for years, a plastic key that mostly downloads the real game anyway.

GOG, of course, could not let this one pass. Their response, posted to X, is the kind of dunk you only get to land when you've spent your entire existence building toward the punchline: download the offline installer of any of your games on GOG, save it to a disc, and it's yours forever. "You don't need a storefront's permission to play what you bought."

It's marketing. It's also just true, which is the annoying part for everyone else.

The part console players are about to learn the hard way

Here's what actually changes in 2028: nothing about ownership, because console "ownership" has been a polite fiction for a while now. The disc was the last artifact that let you pretend otherwise - the thing you could hold, lend, resell, shove in a drawer for fifteen years and dig out later. Take it away and the transaction becomes what it always was underneath: a license, revocable, contingent on a server somewhere deciding you're still allowed.

PC solved this years ago, and not because we're smarter. We solved it because GOG built a store where the file is the product. You go to your account, hit Download Offline Backup Game Installers, and you get an executable that doesn't phone home, doesn't check in, doesn't care whether GOG exists next Tuesday. PC, Mac, Linux. That installer on a drive in your closet is more durable than any disc Sony ever pressed, and it doesn't rot.

I'll be honest about the friction, though, because GOG won't: this is manual work. Nobody is auto-backing-up your library for you. You click through, game by game, and you babysit the downloads. It's the same reason most people who *agree* with all of this have backed up approximately four games and called it a preservation strategy. Myself included, some years.

And burning to a physical disc in 2026 is a little bit of theater. Modern installers laugh at a 4.7 GB DVD, optical drives are basically extinct in new builds, and disc rot is real. If you're serious, the answer is a cheap external drive and a folder that you actually maintain - not a spindle of DVD-Rs in a shoebox. GOG's point survives the nitpick, mind you. The medium was never the argument. The lack of a permission check is.

What I keep coming back to is that Sony's decision is entirely rational and still kind of grim. Discs cost money to press, ship, and warehouse. Cutting them is a spreadsheet decision that will barely register on a quarterly call. But it quietly retires the last mechanism a console buyer had to keep a game without asking anyone.

So yes, GOG is being smug. They've earned it. Go download something you paid for while the download still works.

Image: photo Moma SM / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DVD_2.jpg