Sony's Disc Shutdown in 2028 Will Squeeze Poorer Gamers Hardest, Experts Warn

Sony plans to stop producing physical game discs from 2028, and the people who will feel it most aren't the ones buying $70 downloads on fiber connections. Experts told Decrypt the shift hits low-income gamers hardest, because used discs have long been the cheap back door into console gaming. Sony and PlayStation didn't respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

Joost van Dreunen, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business and author on the video game business, told Decrypt that players at the bottom of the economic spectrum lose retail access and, more importantly, discounted second-hand sales. He said the damage won't show up quickly in major publishers' financials, since their focus has shifted to premium experiences for a luxury class of gamers. The timing stings: Sony raised PS5 prices in March, citing pressures in the global economic landscape, and Fortune reports the next Xbox generation could cost up to $1,800.

Africa gets hit from a different angle. Isa Muhammad, founder of the Africa and Middle East games industry platform Bijetic, told Decrypt the PS5 is already out of reach for most Africans, and that even those who buy one lean on the second-hand market to afford playing. Going digital doesn't offer an easy escape, either — the PlayStation Network is officially supported in just one African nation, South Africa. A gamer in Nigeria who wants to buy digitally has to register a US or UK account and pay with foreign gift cards or a dollar card, he said.

Bandwidth is the quiet cost buried in every download. Van Dreunen said roughly one in four rural American households has no wired provider offering 100/20 Mbps, and that at 10 Mbps a 50GB download drags on for about 11 hours. Muhammad ran the numbers on GTA 6, whose pre-load file is expected to hit 212GB: a Nigerian gamer spends around $80 on the game, then anywhere from $25 to over $60 just on data to pull it down. At Nigeria's median download speed of 36.77 Mbps, per Speedtest by Ookla, that download takes nearly 13 hours.

Muhammad said he recently paid 75,000 NGN — about $55 — for a 450GB broadband bundle, more than Nigeria's minimum monthly wage. He also flagged the account problem: Sony's terms require registering in the country where you live, and the company can suspend or close accounts created with false information, meaning every Nigerian or Egyptian on a US or UK PSN account is breaking the rules from day one. A spokesperson for the UK advocacy group Gamer's Voice told Decrypt the disc cutback will likely affect people on lower incomes more.

The worst-case scenario, per Muhammad, is a disc-free future where an account holds every game a player owns and a locked-out gamer has no way back in. Buy GTA 6 in Africa and lose the account, he said, and you may have to buy it again on a new one — along with everything else gone with it. That fear, he argues, would become the standard reality for PlayStation owners across most of Africa.