The future of video game preservation just took a major hit. This morning, Sony announced that, starting in January 2028, the company will no longer produce physical PlayStation discs, which means that from that moment on you can only purchase new PS5 games digitally. At the same time, Sony also announced that it’s going to start winding down the digital stores for both the PS3 and PS Vita, helpfully illustrating one of the most pertinent issues with a digital-only future for gaming: Once the stores are gone, so are the games. It’s a terrible blow for preservation of the medium.
In a lot of ways, both announcements seemed inevitable. It’s clear that consumers have largely — though not entirely — shifted to buying games digitally. According to Sony’s most recent financial results from May, around 80 percent of PS5 games sold are digital. Meanwhile, just last week, Grand Theft Auto VI developer Rockstar Games announced that when the next GTA shows up in retail stores in November, it will actually just be a code in a box, with no disc.
Digital games are in some ways more convenient for players. You can prep downloads in advance, keep a big library of games on a single console, and take advantage of frequent sales. There are also some notable immediate drawbacks, like the inability to sell used games or simply share a copy with a friend. From the publisher’s perspective, digital games are more lucrative for Sony and its contemporaries, who no longer have to deal with the costs of producing discs.
But a more hidden cost to the digital shift comes in the form of preserving video games. Given the complex nature of consoles and constantly changing formats, preservation is already a massive challenge. Back in 2023, the Video Game History Foundation claimed that 87 percent of classic games — defined as anything released before 2010 — were “critically endangered.” The reason for the 2010 cutoff? That’s when digital storefronts became prominent, portending an even bigger issue in the future. “Our experiences gathering data for this study suggest that these problems will intensify over time due to a low diversity of reissue sources and the long-term volatility of digital game storefronts,” the report read.
The closure of digital stores isn’t new, of course; just two years ago, Nintendo shut down the storefronts for both the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS. And while you can still (for now) download games you’ve already purchased, these closures mean that titles that are exclusive to that particular store are essentially inaccessible to everybody else. If you buy a 3DS right now, you have no way to play the classic puzzler BoxBoy.
In the past, this has perhaps seemed like a minor issue, as the number of digital-exclusive games for platforms like the Wii U and PS Vita was relatively small. But with the entire medium moving toward digital, including industry-shaking giants like GTA VI, this problem becomes much more clear. Starting in 2028, every PlayStation game comes with an expiry date; as soon as the PS5’s digital store shuts down, a huge swath of games will simply become inaccessible. That means not just small digital games, but also major blockbusters.
There have been some steps made to alleviate these issues. Most modern game consoles now let you carry your digital library across devices — Xbox has made some notable efforts on this front — and on PC the storefront GOG has an entire program dedicated to keeping old games playable on modern hardware. These are great and necessary efforts, but they aren’t enough on their own. For one thing, plenty still slips through the cracks; mobile games, for instance, are massively popular, but are rarely subject to preservation efforts outside of fan projects. Just as important is the fact that these efforts rely on the goodwill of platform holders. Once they shut down a store, or stop putting efforts into keeping games playable across multiple generations of hardware, the games are once again impossible to legally play. (This isn’t just a gaming problem, by the way; the shift to streaming is having a similar impact on film.)
Physical media isn’t a perfect solution to these problems. Discs and cartridges will degrade over time, and they usually require specialized hardware to even use. But they at least give players and preservationists a greater degree of control over how they’re able to collect, share, and preserve these experiences, without having to deal with the whims of console makers like Sony. It’s already a nightmare trying to keep old games alive — in 2028, the problem is only going to get worse.
