Will Killing PlayStation Discs Really Make Games Cheaper? Don't Bet On It

Here's a claim I'd genuinely love to believe: once PlayStation goes all-digital, games on the PS Store will get cheaper. That's the argument from Jacob Navok, a former Square Enix business development director, and I've been chewing on it all weekend.

Quick recap: Sony announced in July that it's ending all physical media on PlayStation. From January 2028, every release - first-party, third-party, even code-in-a-box - goes digital-only. Navok's take is that today's PS Store prices are anchored to physical retail pricing, and once that anchor is gone, competition between publishers will do what it did on Steam and push prices down. His key point: publishers set the prices on digital stores, so it's publisher-versus-publisher competition that creates pricing pressure, not store-versus-store.

As a theory, it holds together. As something I'd put money on - less so.

Steam isn't Steam because discs died

PC pricing got aggressive because Steam lives in an ecosystem with competing storefronts, key resellers and two decades of sale culture that trained players to wait. PlayStation will have exactly one storefront, run by the same company that sets the sales calendar. And the track record isn't encouraging - reactions to Navok's comments were quick to point out that digital versions on PlayStation have routinely cost more than the same game on disc, not less.

Then there's the part that hits hardest in our region. The disc was never about nostalgia here - it was the pricing mechanism. Buy at launch, finish it, sell it on and recover a decent chunk of what you paid. Or wait a few months and pick it up second-hand for far less than any official discount. Add lending between friends, and a full-price game quietly became affordable in a market where wages don't match Western European price tags. From 2028, that entire informal economy dies with the disc, and the only discount left is the one Sony's promo calendar decides to give you.

If Navok turns out to be right and PS Store prices genuinely come down, I'll happily eat my words - cheaper games are cheaper games. But publishers have lived in a digital-dominant reality on PC for years, and full price at launch hasn't gone anywhere; it's gone up. My advice until 2028: the used-games market has never looked more attractive. Enjoy it while it exists.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Playstation_Dualsense_controller.jpg