Sony Reminded Everyone They Own Nothing, Right as the Boycott Started

There's bad timing, and then there's emailing your entire user base a legal reminder that their game library is a revocable licence - five days before an organised boycott about exactly that.

That's roughly what happened at PlayStation. Users started getting an unprompted "you recently accepted the following PlayStation terms" email, complete with the Terms of Service and the EULA spelling out that a digital purchase is a limited, non-transferable personal licence. No resale. No lending. Then, on 23 August, the #PSBlackout began - a week-long protest organised by the preservation group DoesItPlay, asking players to log out of PSN, buy nothing digital and pause their subscriptions. The trigger: Sony's plan to stop producing new PlayStation discs from 2028.

I don't think the email was a provocation. It reads like an automated compliance ping. That's almost worse - it means nobody in that company noticed what week it was.

Why discs are not a nostalgia thing here

The English-language version of this debate usually frames physical media as a collector's hobby. Shelves, box art, the smell of a manual. Fine. But that isn't the point in our part of Europe.

A full-price release costs roughly the same here as it does in Munich or Amsterdam. The paycheck doesn't. What always closed that gap is the stuff you can only do with a disc: buy it used, sell it when you're done, hand it to a friend for two weeks, walk into a shop and catch a clearance price the digital store never matched. An entire generation of players around here built their libraries that way. Kill physical and you kill the resale value of everything on the shelf, plus the informal lending network that quietly doubled how many games a household actually played.

Digital-only also hands price control to a single party. With discs, retailers compete against each other. On PSN they don't - and the price of a two-year-old game tends to sit stubbornly where Sony wants it until a seasonal sale says otherwise.

Then there's the part nobody raises on an earnings call: what happens when a storefront shuts down, a licence lapses, or a game gets delisted. The disc still spins. The licence doesn't.

Sony CFO Lin Tao has said the company understands the strong feelings around preservation, but that the shift follows broader digital consumption trends across media. That's the corporate way of saying the trend is real and the margins are better - both of which are true. Streaming did the same thing to music and film. The difference is you can still buy a CD.

Will a week of switched-off consoles change anything? Honestly, no. Sony's quarter won't feel it. Protests like this are a signal, not a lever, and the signal isn't really aimed at 2026 so much as at whoever is speccing the next console - the one that may not have a drive at all.

I buy digital, plenty of it. Convenience is a real argument. I'd just like it to stay a choice rather than the only door left open - and I'd rather not have an automated email explain to me how little that choice was ever worth.

Image: Xephuwu / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KontrolerDualSense.jpg