The PS4 game-sharing meme is back - and this time the hand is empty

In 2013 it took Sony about twenty seconds to win a console generation's worth of goodwill. Shuhei Yoshida hands Adam Boyes a copy of Killzone: Shadow Fall, Boyes says thanks, and that's the whole "instructional video" on how you share games on PS4. Microsoft was busy explaining restrictions on used games for Xbox One at the time, and Sony only had to point at a plastic box.

This week the two of them met again at Tokyo Game Show. Yoshida posted a photo on X with the caption "Met with a best friend" - same pose, same handover, except nobody is holding anything. Both men left PlayStation some time ago, and neither of them explained what the picture is supposed to mean. They didn't have to. The replies did it for them, along the lines of: this is how you share games in 2028.

That year isn't random. Over the summer Sony said it will stop manufacturing discs for new PlayStation games from 2028, and its disc plant is reportedly already being put to other use. I'd be careful about reading a whole manifesto into one photo - it may just be two old colleagues having a laugh. But a joke only works when there's something true underneath it, and this one works very well.

Here's why it stings more in our part of Europe than it might elsewhere. A disc isn't nostalgia here, it's a budget tool. You buy a big release at full price, finish it in three weeks, sell it on for a good chunk of what you paid, and that money goes into the next game. Or you borrow it from a friend and pay nothing. A digital licence does none of that. It costs the same as the disc on day one, often more a few months later when shops have already discounted the boxed copy, and its resale value is exactly zero.

So when someone tells me digital is "just more convenient", I agree - it's more convenient for whoever runs the only store on the console. One shop, one price, no second-hand market to compete with. That's the part the original video was really about: not the disc itself, but the fact that once you paid for a game it was yours to pass along.

The irony is hard to miss. The company that built a whole launch campaign on handing a game to a friend is the one now winding down the thing being handed over. In 2013 the empty hand would have been Microsoft's punchline. In 2026 it fits Sony just fine, and the two people best placed to notice are the ones from the original clip.

Image: Evan-Amos / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PS4-Console-wDS4.jpg