Should We Fear Consoles Going All-Digital, or Does the PC Status Quo Prove It Works?

Game discs have taken a one-two punch over the last couple of weeks: first Rockstar’s announcement that the biggest game launch of the decade won’t include a physical release, then Sony laying out plans to stop making discs for PlayStation consoles by January 2028. Backlash has been fierce, but it’s hard to imagine either company u-turning – the discless future is on its way, whether we like it or not.

For gamers on PC, however, that future is already the present. A desktop has long been my main gaming machine, and frankly I can’t remember the last time I bought a disc – it’s been a while since I’ve even had a drive to slot one into.

For over a decade, discless has been the blanket status quo on PC. While that has come with problems, overall the platform is thriving more than ever, with most players now deeply loyal to dominant digital storefront Steam.

Does that mean a digital future for consoles is all going to be a-ok? Well… maybe. Let’s look back at the history of discless gaming on PC – and what it tells us about where things will go from here.

When Steam first launched in 2003, it was not warmly received. Many players saw it as unnecessary digital rights management (DRM), questioned the purpose of Valve’s new digital storefront, and resisted the idea of ongoing patches and updates to their games.

At the time, that resistance was understandable. Many players were still on dial-up connections, and the idea of being always online was still a long way off. On top of that, the user experience of launch-era Steam was clunky – an awkward hurdle to jump to be part of an idea that felt half-formed.

But if you wanted Half-Life 2, and then Portal and Team Fortress 2, you had to get used to it – what were you going to do, not play some of the best PC games ever made? That gave it a foothold, and before long it grew on us.

The addition of 3rd party games to the storefront – starting with the oft-forgotten Rag Doll Kung Fu – cemented the idea that it could be something bigger than just a place to download Valve games. The Steam app itself became increasingly slick and functional. And around it, the world caught up, with both faster internet speeds and bigger hard drives becoming more and more accessible.

At the same time, those factors were contributing to the rise of online PC game piracy – a looming (if arguably overstated) threat that, combined with the second-hand market, made publishers increasingly wary of physical discs. Methods were deployed to encourage players not to share or copy discs, including one-time-use codes unlocking exclusive content and online multiplayer modes in singleplayer games. But none were as effective as simply selling games digitally, forever bound to one person’s account.

For consumers, Steam increasingly became less an obstruction and more a convenience – a one-stop shop for all your games, with regular sales and offers that physical stores couldn’t match encouraging loyalty. As players increasingly chose digital purchases over physical, publishers figured they were better off pulling back on physical discs and investing in their own attempts at digital storefronts instead (to varying degrees of success).

By the 2010s, physical game discs for PC were already practically unheard of, and as the same move to digital and streaming solutions happened across software, music, film, and TV, soon the final nail was hammered into the coffin: PCs stopped shipping with disc drives at all. The CD-ROM was officially dead.

So, how’s that going now? Well, not too bad for the most part. These days, those playing primarily on PC hardly miss game discs at all – even in their most nostalgic moments sparing more of a thought for cloth maps and chunky manuals than the CD-ROMs that came with them. In fact, most have become so accustomed to the modern convenience of Steam that they resent any other method or platform for purchasing games.

We’ve willingly given up physical media and the benefits that do come with it, trading second hand markets and game sharing for 75% off sales and enormous backlogs.

A decade from now, an all-digital world on PlayStation and other consoles will probably be just as accepted, whether that seems objectionable now or not. But, crucially, PC and consoles are not equivalent platforms – and if Sony doesn’t act responsibly from here, the downsides could be a lot more evident.

The key difference is that PC gaming enjoys the rule of a relatively benevolent dictator. Valve isn’t perfect but it’s a private company, not beholden to shareholders, and its driving motivation seems to be a genuine enthusiasm for gaming and tech as much as profit. Even its most unpopular moves rarely seem cynical or ruthless, and most players are able to broadly trust that Steam will stick around for the foreseeable future as a reliable and user-friendly platform.

And if it ever does go off the rails, we have other options. Valve enjoys a near-monopoly, but competition still exists and unhappy customers are free to shop elsewhere, including with options like GOG that offer totally DRM-free downloads.

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PlayStation, like all the major consoles, is a closed ecosystem. Sony controls it all directly – and as a massive, publicly-traded company, its motivations are not necessarily customer-friendly. It has competition, but only externally to the platform – you’re free to go and play on an Xbox or a Switch instead, but your PlayStation can only (legally) play games that Sony sells you, on its terms.

As that grip has grown tighter and tighter, physical discs have acted as one little backdoor in the system. Sony has final say on what is playable on their console, but it can’t control the second-hand market–-if you don’t like its prices, you’re at least free to see if GameStop, or indeed your cousin Greg who’s been clearing out his garage, can make you a better offer.

Equally, while it can freely change games, remove them, or opt not to make them backwards-compatible, it can’t take your physical discs away from you – and thus you retain some kind of genuine ownership, rather than just a digital license.

The phasing out of discs closes the backdoor for good. Outside of illegal console modding and piracy, Sony’s law becomes absolute. So how bad or tolerable the situation becomes depends entirely on how responsibly it acts.

The first question is price – with no second-hand market, is Sony free to crank up the cost of its games with impunity? I think this is the issue to worry least about – while a creeping up of the price of launch day triple-A games is at this point inevitable, overall digital distribution has only led to deeper discounts. The PlayStation store’s track record on sales and game pricing is pretty normal, roughly just staying in step with its competition on other consoles.

More concerning is the way that games can be delisted from the store and potentially even taken away from players who originally bought them – especially following recent news of 550 movies deleted from the platform and removed from customer’s libraries. This is where the concept of ownership itself comes into question. If what you have is only a license to a digital product, your rights to that product in perpetuity are shaky.

It should be said, though, that we don’t currently have any prior example of Sony removing a purchased game from anyone’s library – at least, outside of cases like Concord where the game itself closed down and refunds were issued. That doesn’t make the fear unfounded, but it would at least be an unprecedented move.

The other, perhaps most pressing headache is game preservation. Holding on to the modern history of games is difficult at the best of times in our increasingly online-focused world. PC, at least, is an open enough platform to make keeping old games alive and playable even when they’re no longer for sale possible more often than not (if not always technically legally).

With PlayStation’s closed ecosystem, discs have offered one of the few ways to ensure a game is preserved long-term – and in its original form, before updates may have changed it completely. With that option disappearing, the onus is on Sony to take its responsibility to its own history seriously. Backwards compatibility is one part of that puzzle, and PlayStation’s track record there is currently respectable. But there will continue to be games that simply vanish from the service or have fundamental elements altered as licenses expire, and where they’re not available on other platforms, they’ll simply be gone.

There is, admittedly, something I’ve been leaving unsaid here. The perhaps unfortunate truth of all this is that really this ship already sailed years ago. Simply popping a disc in your console and playing the game right away has not been the experience for a long time. Gaming is now built around the idea that publishers can from day one push major mandatory patches and updates to your system.

Disconnect your console from the internet and try playing unpatched, and typically what you get is a deeply compromised version of the game, with major bugs left in on the assumption you would never normally see them. And that’s assuming the game doesn’t withhold major features from offline players, or simply block access completely. In many ways the actual disc has become vestigial to the downloadable experience.

Many games are already sold exclusively on digital storefronts, never receiving a disc release at all. That includes many of the games that have been notably delisted from storefronts, meaning discs have been no bastion for those for a while anyway. Meanwhile in other industries, formats like the CD for music or the DVD for film and TV hold on by their fingernails, while consumer focus shifts increasingly to streaming as the go-to solution.

In other words, the phasing out of physical discs doesn’t start now; it started about 10 years ago. PC is ahead of the game, but not that far ahead. The fact that the launch of GTA 6 – a truly industry-defining release in financial terms – isn’t bothering with discs is a sign that these major companies are more than comfortable that the status quo has already moved on.

There’s no standing against the march of progress (especially progress towards more efficient profits for major companies) and even if there was, we’re already years too late to start on this particular front. The focus now has to be on holding companies like Sony to account for their use of this even more consolidated power. When you don’t like what you’re seeing, let them know and vote with your wallet.

I can’t promise that the future will be bright, but I can at least say that an all-digital platform doesn’t have to be doom and gloom. And hey, if it all goes wrong, you’re very welcome to come join us on PC instead. Er, that is if RAM ever becomes affordable again.

Robin Valentine is a freelancer journalist who combines years of writing experience with his lifelong love of PC gaming. Formerly the editor of PC Gamer magazine (and the dearly departed GamesMaster), he’ll happily devour any RPG, strategy game, or roguelike that stumbles into his path.