You buy a game in physical format, get home, open the box, put in the disc and expect to play. That sequence, which for three decades was the very definition of “owning” a video game, has stopped holding true for a not-insignificant share of the current catalog. An analysis published this week finally puts numbers to that suspicion: for a third of physical PlayStation 5 games the disc is not enough. And it arrives just as Sony has confirmed to its investors that it has no intention of reversing its move away from the physical format.
The figure: 34% of PS5 games don’t work fully from the disc
The numbers come from DoesItPlay, an independent database dedicated to checking, one by one, whether a game on physical media can be installed and played without an internet connection. Of 792 physical releases tested on PS5, 34% do not work fully as intended without first applying a patch or a download.
The comparison between platforms helps to order the problem, although it should be read with care because the samples are very different:
What the per-console tests say
On the Xbox Series X, the proportion of complete discs playable directly from the physical copy stands at 50%, although the figure comes from just 78 entries analysed. Switch 2 fares better, with 75% of cartridges actually containing the game, also on a reduced base of 48 titles. Across the whole catalog tested by the project, 27% is associated with problems ranging from severe errors or missing content to cases where files that were simply never on the media are absent.
The nuance matters: not all of those games are impossible to boot. There are degrees. Some retain a functional base but reach the user in a degraded state; in others, what is missing weighs so heavily that the box becomes almost decorative wrapping with a key inside. The conclusion, however, is hard to avoid: the disc can no longer be taken for granted as a complete copy.
How the tests are carried out
The value of the method lies in its radicalism. The checks are performed with hardware disconnected from the network, clean installs and local profiles, without logging into any external service that could complete or validate the experience in the background. In other words, it reproduces the scenario that truly matters for preservation: what will happen to that disc in fifteen years, when the servers that today serve the day-one patch no longer exist.
Sony to its investors: “we are going to move forward with it”
The context explains everything. On 1 July, Sony announced that from January 2028 it will stop producing discs for all new PlayStation releases. The reaction from the community and small publishers was so negative that the company spent days in silence on its social networks.
The one who finally got an answer was not the player, but the shareholder. In its latest earnings call, the Japanese company acknowledged that “people have different points of view and we understand that the community has expressed those opinions”, but closed the door clearly: “we invested a lot of time considering all the implications, but we reached this conclusion and we are going to move forward with it“. The official argument is that “the digitalization of content in general has followed its course, not only for PlayStation, but for all types of content”.
That a reversal was unlikely was already hinted at by an industrial detail: Sony had begun converting its Blu-ray disc factory in Austria, the world’s main one, toward the production of optical microlenses. Factories are not converted in order to go back.
Anonymous’ response: “buying” doesn’t mean what you think
Days before that call came an unexpected reaction in tone. Anonymous published a lengthy statement that, far from threatening retaliation, put forward a consumer argument with notable rigor. Its central thesis is simple and devastating: when we pay for a game, a film or a digital disc, we are not buying the content, but a license to use it of indeterminate duration.
It is not theory. PlayStation Store itself has in the past removed films that its customers believed they had bought, and the examples keep piling up in music, books and video games. If the file cannot be saved to an external hard drive and played freely, in practice it is not yours: it is a revocable permission.
What can be done in the meantime
The collective’s recommendation matches that of much of the preservation community: buy in physical format while it still exists, check in databases such as the one mentioned whether that particular disc brings the game inside, and rely on DRM-free PC platforms —such as GOG or itch.io— that allow you to download the installers and keep them on a NAS, an external drive or your own copy. A file you can copy is a file that survives the company that sold it to you.
A dress rehearsal for everything else
It would be a mistake to read this as a niche discussion among nostalgic gamers. The model that is being normalized on consoles —you pay, you don’t own, and access depends on a server staying on— is exactly the same one that already governs subscription enterprise software, audio and video libraries, ebooks and a good part of the cloud services that sustain any SME.
The difference is that in video games the change is visible and has a date: January 2028. In the rest of our digital lives it has been happening silently for years, without a box, without a disc and without anyone counting how many of our purchases are still really in our hands.
