The Disc Is Dying, and It Costs Players Here the Most

Dan Houser, one of the people who built Rockstar, got asked about the physical games debate while he was out promoting a comic, and his answer was refreshingly blunt: if people want physical media, companies should provide it.

Easy to say from the outside. Harder when the studio you co-founded just built the biggest game of the decade and decided it won't ship on a disc at all.

That is the backdrop. Grand Theft Auto 6 is going download-only, and Sony has said it will stop producing physical discs for its games after January 2028. Two separate decisions, both pointing the same way: the disc is on its way out.

For players here, the disc was never nostalgia

It was math. A physical copy meant you could buy it cheaper from a shop in Germany or elsewhere in the EU, resell it once you were done, lend it to a friend, or grab a used copy for half the price. Every one of those options quietly vanishes the moment a game becomes a download code welded to a single account.

That matters more in this region than the industry likes to admit. When a full-price release eats a serious chunk of an average paycheck, the second-hand market and lending aren't a hobby - they are how normal people afford to play at all.

What "digital-only" actually removes

Strip away the PR and the losses are concrete. Resale value drops to zero. Lending is gone. The old trick of hunting a cheaper regional price gets much harder. And preservation becomes somebody else's problem: when the servers go dark, a download is just a dead icon. Anyone who owned The Crew already learned that lesson the expensive way.

Houser saying companies "should provide it" if people want it is a nice sentiment, but the market is drifting the other way for a boring reason - digital is simply more profitable. No manufacturing, no shipping, and crucially no used-game market cutting into new sales. That last part is the quiet motive nobody puts in a press release.

I'm not romantic about plastic. Discs scratch, drives fail, and honestly most of us buy digital anyway. But a disc is the one form of ownership a publisher can't patch, revoke, or delist out from under you. Take that away and "buying" a game slowly turns into a long-term rental that nobody bothered to print on the box.

Image: Dietmar Rabich / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CDs,_Seitenansicht_--_2017_--_2218.jpg