Retailer Launches Don’t Kill the Disc Petition to Save Physical Games
Last week, Sony announced that they would no longer be producing physical games in 2028. That, plus the recent news that the Grand Theft Auto 6 physical edition will only have a code, has brought a lot of pushback from gamers.
So much so that an independent retailer has launched the “Don’t Kill the Disc” petition in hopes of reversing Sony’s decision of going away from physical media.
PNP Games, a Canadian independent video game retailer, launched the petition on change.org asking fans to join in with telling Sony that their decision should not move forward. So far, at the time of writing, the petition has 174,841 signatures.
Jade Pearce, the petition starter, made a powerful statement, saying, “The irony is hard to miss. At E3 2013, Sony won over a generation of players by promising that when you buy a PlayStation game, you can trade it in, sell it, lend it to a friend, or ‘keep it forever,’ and famously mocked the competition for trying to restrict exactly that.”
“Thirteen years later, Sony is the one taking it away.”
The announcement that Sony was stopping physical production was made on July 1, and since then, gamers and developers alike have been in agreement that physical media should not go away. According to the announcement, any game made before 2028 will continue to have physical discs, but any game released after 2028 will only have a code.
The swap to digital media is not only harming collectors, but, like Pearce says, “This is also about jobs.”
“Physical games support an entire industry that an all-digital future quietly erases: retailers, distributors, manufacturers, warehousing, and logistics, the pre-owned and trade-in market,” she says. “That is thousands of jobs and countless small businesses.”
“We are not against digital. We are digital beings, the only option. A large and passionate community still wants a real, physical game they own outright, and Sony is about to take that choice away.”
So far, with the number of signatures the petition has had, there hasn’t been a response from Sony as of yet.
