The Loss of Physical Media on PS5 Will Hit Gamers Hard in One Major Way

You’ve probably heard of this a million times already, but in case you aren’t aware, the days of physical video games are numbered. PlayStation owner Sony kicked off this month with the announcement that it would cease production of all physical releases of PlayStation games starting in January 2028. It was revealed that this move would not only apply to first-party PlayStation games, but also to all games released on PlayStation that are made by third-party companies.

Unsurprisingly, Sony’s sudden decision to kill physical media been met with an extreme amount of backlash from fans. Things have gotten so bad, in fact, that PlayStation hasn’t been able to make a single post on its social media channels without getting disliked to oblivion by fans.

Key among the complaints that people have had about this move is the death of game ownership; or rather, the inability to permanently access games. As many people online have rightfully pointed out, gamers do not have the right to indefinitely own the titles that they purchase on digital-only storefronts. Any and all products can be removed from a customer’s digital library at any time, without warning from the publisher or platform holder.

The All-Digital Future Will Make Certain Games Harder to Access

Physical media was effectively the last bastion of true game ownership; even if a company were to decide that it was no longer interested in distributing a video game, there was nothing said company could do to remove the game from one’s physical library. But in a digital-only landscape, that is a lot easier for them to do.

The debate on ownership has been discussed extensively online, but one thing that I haven’t seen many gamers point out is that the move to an all-digital future will significantly limit the amount of games that we can access. To the uninformed, this may sound a bit silly. After all, physical copies of certain games are usually a lot harder to get ahold of compared to their instantaneous digital counterparts. However, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

When you create a PlayStation account, you are required to tell Sony what country you live in. Once you do so, you are given the ability to purchase all the games on that region’s respective PlayStation storefront. Failure to provide accurate information on this matter is against PlayStation’s terms of service, meaning that there is a chance that your account will get permanently banned for doing this.

PlayStation Makes It Way Too Difficult to Change Your Account’s Region

What’s more, once you choose a region, you are not allowed to change it to another region without creating a brand-new PlayStation account. It’s pretty easy to change your account’s region on Xbox and Nintendo consoles, but it can’t be done at all on Sony’s platform.

Before I frighten you any further, it’s worth noting that there are many people around the world who use PlayStation accounts in regions that they shouldn’t be doing so. The PlayStation Network is only available in 60 or so countries; everyone who lives in a country outside of these supported regions essentially has to lie about where they live, in order to purchase games on the PlayStation storefront.

People who live in these unsupported regions have been doing this for years, and there hasn’t been many reports of them getting their accounts banned on a large scale, despite them technically breaking storefront policies.

The most concerning thing about Sony’s push to an all-digital future is not the (relatively slim) potential of your account getting banned, it’s the likelihood that you won’t be able to purchase games outside of your region easily anymore.

Some Games on PlayStation Are Only Available in Certain Regions

For those who don’t know, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of video games on the PlayStation storefront that are not available in all territories. Many of these games are exclusive to Asian regions, meaning that English-speaking gamers cannot easily buy them digitally, even if they do have English language support.

Titles like The Id@lmaster Starlit Season, Gintama Rumble, Winning Post 10 2026, and Venus Vacation Prism – Dead or Alive Xtreme – have all been released physically and digitally on PlayStation consoles, but they cannot be bought on, say, PlayStation’s U.K. and U.S. storefronts.

Because of this, gamers in the West who want to play these games only have one of two options: either create a brand-new PlayStation account in an Asian region and go through some hoops to purchase the game using that region’s currency, or purchase a physical copy of the game.

Sony Should Do Something to Change This, But It Probably Won’t

Obviously, buying a physical copy of a game is way easier than creating a new account. And, unlike PlayStation accounts, physical PlayStation games are not region-locked. It doesn’t matter where you bought your PS5 from; any physical PlayStation 5 disc will work on any PlayStation 5 console.

In the future, when physical game discs cease to exist and the only thing available to purchase at retailers are code-in-a-box releases, buying PlayStation games that aren’t being sold in your region is going to become a lot more difficult. Unless Sony decides to make digital game codes region-free, it seems like things are going to get a whole lot worse on this end.