Discs? DISCS? Where we’re going, we don’t need any discs.
Sony has had quite the fortnight. First, it announced that 551 Studio Canal films and TV shows will be removed from PlayStation video libraries on 1 September 2026, including from the accounts of people who actually paid for them. Consumers should not lose access to media they bought, and consumer protection laws ought to stop store owners, distributors, or copyright holders from deleting digital purchases at will. Then, on 1 July, Sony revealed that starting in January 2028, it will stop manufacturing physical discs for new PlayStation games. Both decisions send the exact same message.
A few details make this situation even worse. These aren’t just titles being taken off the market; they are being clawed back from libraries people already paid for. Sony stopped selling and renting films on the PlayStation Store in 2021, so these aren’t just titles being withdrawn from sale; they are being removed from collections people already bought. The removal affects the UK and Europe (US users apparently get to keep theirs) and includes titles such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Total Recall, Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, Hot Fuzz, Paddington 2, and Pan’s Labyrinth. There are no refunds or compensation. Sony’s notice blames “content licensing agreements” but offers no further explanation. This isn’t the first time: Sony pulled the same trick with Studio Canal in Germany and Austria in 2022, and in December 2023 it announced the removal of purchased Discovery TV content, reversing the decision only after monumental public backlash.
The “You will own nothing and like it” era
Today, we consume digital content instantly across various platforms. Yet convenience routinely trumps true ownership, leaving digital products vulnerable to deletion even after they are no longer on sale. If you violate the terms and conditions on your Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, or Google account, they can wipe anything you have “bought” forever. If a distributor or publisher goes bust, your film or book vanishes from your online library. If licensing terms shift, you face the exact same outcome. The PlayStation End User Agreement, like most digital storefront terms, explicitly states that you’re buying only a licence to view content, which can be withdrawn when the underlying licensing deal ends. The word “purchase” on the checkout button is utterly misleading.
This happened to me personally with the film Attila Marcel by Sylvain Chomet, the director of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. I bought a copy on Apple TV, only for it to disappear a year or two later. When I asked Apple for a refund, they refused, claiming the distributor had gone out of business. Had I downloaded the movie to my Mac, I could have kept watching it, but with over 500 films in my collection, storing them all locally is a massive pain in the arse. Apple hardly makes archiving easy, especially for movies: anything with “iTunes Extras” cannot be downloaded and stays streaming-only.
Ironically, Attila Marcel remained available to buy on Amazon Prime for about four months after Apple removed it. In the end, I bought the DVD instead. If I were more practical, I would buy a Blu-ray drive for my Mac and convert my collection into a format playable on any device. But format-shifting remains technically illegal under UK copyright law. The High Court quashed the private-copying exception introduced in 2014 in 2015, meaning copying your own legally purchased discs is unlawfully off-limits, which feels woefully behind the times.
As media shifts fully to digital, we are heading towards a world where high-street shops like CeX (and anywhere selling second-hand DVDs, Blu-rays, and games) will eventually vanish under strict rights management. You will not be able to share, sell, or gift your copy of a film, game, or book unless the digital rights management system graciously permits it. When ownership gives way to mere access, the secondary market dies, and consumers lose all control over what they have bought. Piracy will inevitably rise. Judging by the online reaction to the Studio Canal news, plenty of people have already reached the same conclusion.
Better digital rights for consumers
UK law needs to guarantee robust protections for digital purchases so storefronts, partners, and third-party sellers cannot simply revoke paid-for content. If consumers buy media, they should be entitled to keep it.
Consumers should also have a statutory right to port purchased digital goods between services. If your account is closed for any reason, your purchased content ought to be transferred to an equivalent platform elsewhere.
If a distributor removes content from a store, it must remain available for existing owners to download from that store or another, free of charge. “Due to content licensing agreements” should not be a magic spell that makes your money vanish. If downloading is impossible, you must pay reasonable compensation.
Naturally, storefronts and rights owners need sensible provisions too. Hardware cycles move on: we are on the PS5 (and PS5 Pro) now, and analysts suggest Sony’s January 2028 disc deadline signals the PS6 will not arrive before then. It’s reasonable to consider how long developers should support legacy platforms. However, given that enthusiasts are still coding new 8-bit games for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, saying “the platform is old” is a flimsy excuse.
The empire strikes back
My fear for the future is that tech companies will quietly change their terminology to protect themselves and rights holders. Words like “purchase” and “buy” will be rebranded as “long-term rental” or “indefinite licence”, which still lets them remove content at will without compensation. Worse still, they might apply this change retrospectively to past purchases. In a way, Sony has already pulled this manoeuvre: the EULA’s small print always said “licence”, even as the shopfront checkout button boldly proclaimed “buy”.
Monopoly money
This brings us to pricing. Going digital-only does not just mean losing access to a game; it means losing the ability to shop around. If a game exists solely as a PlayStation download, the PlayStation Store is the only place on Earth that sells it. Sony sets the price and demands a 30% commission on every transaction. Compare that with physical discs, where Amazon, supermarkets, and specialist shops actively compete and undercut each other. Sony understood this dynamic perfectly, which is presumably why in 2019 it banned third-party retailers from selling digital game download codes, eliminating the last source of competitive pricing on its platform. (A US class action over that move was quietly settled for $7.85 million, with no admission of wrongdoing, naturally.)
This is not just personal grumbling; it is currently being fought in court. The Alex Neill v Sony class action at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, representing roughly 11 million UK consumers for purchases made between August 2016 and February 2026, alleges Sony abused its dominant position by blocking store competition. This allowed Sony to overcharge for digital games and add-ons by about 20%. The evidence is striking: physical copies of the same games sold in retail shops averaged 20% cheaper than digital versions. Estimated damages sit at roughly £182 per class member, totalling around £2 billion. The ten-week trial, the longest of its kind, concluded in May 2026, with the Tribunal now deliberating. Sony argues it competes with Xbox and Nintendo at the console level and that commissions subsidise cheap hardware. The counter-argument is far more compelling: nobody standing in Argos can realistically calculate the lifetime cost of digital games before buying a console.
The UK is not an isolated case. A parallel Dutch action representing 1.7 million gamers claims the digital markup hits 47% over physical discs, with related claims brewing in Portugal and Australia. Precedent exists for this going badly for platform holders: the Tribunal previously ruled against Apple over its 30% App Store commission, leading to a £1.5 billion fine.
Without discs, Sony sets the price for every new game, and as Studio Canal buyers learned, access remains entirely revocable. Right now, the physical disc is the economic escape valve, the one version of a game whose price is dictated by the open market rather than Sony. From 2028, that valve is welded shut for new releases.
This comes as Rockstar confirms that the “physical” edition of Grand Theft Auto VI contains no disc whatsoever. Instead, the full-priced box ($79.99 standard, $99.99 Ultimate) holds only a download code. Boxed copies go on sale on 12 November, so buyers can pre-load before the 19 November launch. Take-Two’s CEO denied reports of “no physical version” back in February, and technically he wasn’t lying: a box exists, but it contains only a piece of paper. Reports differ on whether a real disc edition will ever follow. Rockstar support vaguely promised a “physical copy” in “the following months”, whereas sources at The Hollywood Reporter claim no discs are planned at launch or afterwards. A few specialist retailers have refused to stock it on principle.
Digital distribution does offer genuine benefits. Pre-ordering allows you to pre-load massive files, avoiding day-one network congestion when millions try to download GTA VI at once. Developers can patch installed games easily, and game sizes are no longer constrained by optical disc limits. Sony and its partners haven’t expanded disc capacities since UHD Blu-ray, as ecosystems shift to digital. Preventing leaks is another obvious motive: no physical stock in warehouses means no broken street dates. None of this, however, explains why a piece of paper in a plastic box costs the same as a download.
Physical media use is actually increasing?
We must take these headlines with a grain of salt. A widely shared TechRadar article quoted manufacturing agency Key Production Group, which reported a 10,000% increase in its own Blu-ray orders over the past decade, particularly for Blu-ray Audio. That reflects one company’s order book, not the entire market. ERA figures from December 2025 show that physical video overall continues to decline. Even so, Blu-ray grew by around 3%, marking a genuine turnaround after years of declines. 4K UHD steelbooks and special editions drove that growth, accounting for roughly £2 of every £10 spent on 4K discs in 2025. Vinyl continues its steady resurgence, and boutique labels like the Criterion Collection keep releasing beautifully restored films on disc with rich features.
Physical media may not be booming across the board, but the premium, collector-driven side of the market is demonstrably alive. Every time Sony emails customers that paid-for content will be removed, it serves as free advertising for physical discs.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we need stronger consumer protection laws for digital media. Big tech cannot strip away content we paid for simply because licensing deals expired behind closed doors. That is not our problem; it is Sony’s, and they need to fix it if they want to retain our custom. But when individual consumers try to take on a corporate juggernaut like Sony, I am reminded of Mr Prosser in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy asking Arthur Dent how much damage the bulldozer would suffer if he just lay down and let it roll straight over him: “None at all.” Without enforceable legal protections, any boycott or consumer protest will do just as little damage to Sony.