Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The most harrowing thing about PlayStation removing support for physical copies of games is that they know that this decision is going to cause backlash. They just don't care. They told staffs to have the "strictest" social media guidelines. They are told to stop commenting on people and resist the urge to respond and all that.
Gaming media is continuously pushing news and articles about how physical is unreliable and how Blu-Ray copies are going to "rot." No, they're going to work just fine assuming that you took care of them. This is just creating unnecessary panic for people. There are DVDs that still work to this day, let alone Blu-Rays which are way more durable.
And then, there's the issue of PlayStation receiving an outage last week as people cannot play multiplayer or even some single player games because they couldn't verify their license with Sony. This is the all-digital future that these manufacturers chose for us. It's one where you must believe in Sony to keep the network infrastructure secure and reliable.
Even if Blu-Ray copies of games or films are going to be an enthusiast product, even if most people chose to download the games online or chose to stream the films on streaming services because they're more convenient, at least support external Blu-Ray readers or better yet, make one yourself. You don't have to include it in your new console. Modern PCs and laptops don't include disc readers but at least support the external readers. It's not an unreasonable request to provide software support for those.
There are still many people who want to watch their films and series with the least amount of compression the same way there are still many that want to actually own the majority of the content of their games inside the disc. I get that some of these products will depend on software update, but at least the content is still in the disc.
If Sony can come to a reasonable compromise and either make their own external Blu-Ray disc reader for future consoles or support the many manufacturers that do make them, that would've been slightly more tolerable, but no. They want to keep all the Sony PlayStation products for themselves to squeeze as little profit margins as they can.
At this point, if you want open hardware support to read physical media, you might as well go to PC. You plug in internal or external readers, and they will read them perfectly fine.
The most harrowing thing about PlayStation removing support for physical copies of games is that they know that this decision is going to cause backlash. They just don't care. They told staffs to have the "strictest" social media guidelines. They are told to stop commenting on people and resist the urge to respond and all that.
Gaming media is continuously pushing news and articles about how physical is unreliable and how Blu-Ray copies are going to "rot." No, they're going to work just fine assuming that you took care of them. This is just creating unnecessary panic for people. There are DVDs that still work to this day, let alone Blu-Rays which are way more durable.
And then, there's the issue of PlayStation receiving an outage last week as people cannot play multiplayer or even some single player games because they couldn't verify their license with Sony. This is the all-digital future that these manufacturers chose for us. It's one where you must believe in Sony to keep the network infrastructure secure and reliable.
Even if Blu-Ray copies of games or films are going to be an enthusiast product, even if most people chose to download the games online or chose to stream the films on streaming services because they're more convenient, at least support external Blu-Ray readers or better yet, make one yourself. You don't have to include it in your new console. Modern PCs and laptops don't include disc readers but at least support the external readers. It's not an unreasonable request to provide software support for those.
There are still many people who want to watch their films and series with the least amount of compression the same way there are still many that want to actually own the majority of the content of their games inside the disc. I get that some of these products will depend on software update, but at least the content is still in the disc.
If Sony can come to a reasonable compromise and either make their own external Blu-Ray disc reader for future consoles or support the many manufacturers that do make them, that would've been slightly more tolerable, but no. They want to keep all the Sony PlayStation products for themselves to squeeze as little profit margins as they can.
At this point, if you want open hardware support to read physical media, you might as well go to PC. You plug in internal or external readers, and they will read them perfectly fine.
