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If you listen closely with an ear to the east on a warm, summer morning over the next few weeks, you're likely to hear the sound of construction vehicles warming up.
While we are in the midst of traffic cone season here in our great commonwealth, I am referring to the bulldozer that Sony is currently warming up to plow ahead with its recent plans to end production of physical Playstation games beginning in January 2028.
Sony received plenty of backlash from its fans online when it first made the announcement a few weeks ago, and it hasn't really gotten any better for them since, including a multi-day, self-imposed social media exile while they ignored the constant jeers regarding "the elephant in the room."
The end of physical game discs for Playstation feels like one more nail in the coffin for physical media in the era of streaming. Growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, going to the store and bringing home a new game box, or opening up a new game on a birthday, Christmas or Easter, was the greatest feeling, and many gamers hang on to those cases and boxes as momentos and trophies of a job well done, an adventure completed or a good time had. I personally own an entire shelf of game discs and cases, and whether it was a solo adventure or something I did with friends, each box holds cherished memories.
The fallout over the past several weeks has left me wondering an even more important question for console gaming fans -- what's to stop these companies from moving completely away from designing and engineering consoles entirely and the TV itself is the console?
Netflix has already shown us a glimpse of what that could look like with its series of streaming games available on the service.
This move also begs the question of what Microsoft and Nintendo are going to do in response, or rather, will they follow suit.
Neither are strangers to the digital market place. In fact, one could argue that Xbox's digital store front during the Xbox 360 era was began the whole digital arms race, incepting the idea into the heads of game manufacturers and developers that you don't, in fact, have to spend the money printing games onto discs when the internet is seemingly infinite -- and it's much cheaper to slap a file on a server than it is to manufacture and then ship game discs (or game cards in Nintendo's case) all over the world.
Nintendo has also been a part of the digital gaming space for about 20 years now to varying degrees of success. Their "virtual console" that allowed players purchase classic titles from the Nintendo library for reasonable prices is an accomplishment the company hasn't ever been able to match.
Many assumed that the wild success of the program during the WiiU era would carry past 2016 into what eventually became a nearly decade-long era with the Switch, even with some sort of delay.
Those fans were dead wrong. To this day Nintendo has never bothered to return to the heights they reached with the virtual console, instead sporadically re-releasing select older titles, such as earlier this year with Pokemon: Fire Red and Pokemon: Leaf Green, or remastering older games and charging full price for them, such as StarFox, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door or the forthcoming The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
To play devil's advocate briefly though -- do we even really need to keep physical games anymore? Honestly, they've sort of lost their luster over the years anyway. If you aren't just getting a plastic case with a download code inside, you're just getting that same plastic case, and a disc or card that equates to an access key -- you still have to download nearly the entire thing onto your hard drive anyway. At that point, is it really worth a trip to the store?
We still have a long way to go until Sony's January 2028 shutdown for physical game production, and there's always the chance public pressure could get the better of them in the months ahead. But one thing is perfectly clear -- physical media is on life support.
Digital content coordinator Dan Isenberg can be reached at disenberg@altoonamirror.com or on X @TheseDanTweets.