What PlayStation's digital-only future means for PS6, explained

Expect 2028 to be a transitional year for Sony

Over the last few weeks, it seems like Sony and Microsoft can’t manage to go 24 hours without trying to one-up each other in the Horrible News Olympics. On Wednesday, PlayStation announced plans to stop selling physical game discs by January 2028. The company also intends to cease support for PlayStation 3 and Vita hardware on its digital storefront. While PlayStation’s official blog post on the news doesn’t mention the PlayStation 6, there are several things we can infer about Sony’s plans for its new wave of hardware — and how it’s approaching the upcoming tenth generation of console gaming.

No PS6 before 2028

To the delight of no one, rumors and reporting circulated throughout 2025 that Sony planned to release a new console in 2027. It wouldn’t make sense for the company to discontinue physical copies of games just a few months into the lifespan of a new console — that would confuse and annoy players. This news suggests that 2028 will be a transitional year for Sony, with new hardware presumably launching in the summer or fall (or even later).

No disc drive – not even an optional one

At this point, it’s not clear exactly what the PS6 will look like. Will it be another chunky box that lives under your living room television, or will it be a dockable handheld in the vein of the Nintendo Switch? But now we know one thing for sure: it won’t have a disc drive. The PS5 moved toward phasing out disc drives by making the digital-only hardware less expensive and offering the disc drive as an optional secondary purchase.

Got a dodgy internet connection, or live in a rural area? Too bad for you. Time to rediscover the joys of retro gaming, I guess.

Sony thinks hardware costs will stay high

Amid the firestorm brewing over at Xbox in recent weeks, we’ve seen a lot of discussion about margins — namely, how much profit these companies are making after costs are deducted from revenue. With RAM costs continuing to rise, it’s safe to assume that hardware is going to be a less reliable revenue driver for PlayStation than it has been in years past. Even if Sony passes memory costs onto the consumer — say, by charging $1,500 for a new PlayStation model — the company is clearly thinking ahead about other ways to make money. Sony takes a larger slice of the pie on first- and third-party games by selling digital copies on its own storefront. Kicking retailers out of that walled garden — and eliminating the secondary market — allows Sony to hoard more of that pie.

Less price flexibility for players

It’s no secret that digital sales of video games far outpace physical ones. "This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs," said Sid Shuman, senior director of content communications, on the PlayStation Blog. "This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today."

Invoking “our community” sounds very nice, but this move will not benefit PlayStation users. It only benefits Sony. Going digital-only gives Sony far greater control over the price of its games. For one thing, this will essentially eliminate the PS6 resale market — no more buying a used copy of a game a year or two post-launch. Even if you hate clutter, have an all-digital game library, and have no interest in selling your games, you currently benefit from the existence of a secondary market. When that goes away, prices go up and stay up.

It also means Sony will no longer have to compete on price with big-box retailers like Gamespot, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy. Once a game’s been out for a while, physical copies often see better discounts than digital ones. If Sony’s digital-only push proceeds as planned, those deals will vanish in the PS6 era.

Still time to flip flop

Sony has been very cheeky with the timing of this announcement. In the more immediate term, it comes just after Rockstar Games has announced that “physical copies” of GTA 6 will just be a download code in a box, creating a permission structure for other companies to embrace similarly unpopular-yet-profitable digital-only strategies. It also comes amid widespread reports that Microsoft plans catastrophic layoffs across its Xbox division, which is sure to make Sony’s rival the gaming community’s villain of the month.

But also, 2028 is a pretty long way away. Xbox raised hardware prices three times in just 14 months, after all! Maybe the AI bubble will burst. Maybe fans will continue to stay angry at Sony about this, and they’ll flip flop.

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. After fan outcry, the company reversed a decision to close the PS3 and Vita storefronts back in 2021. (Yes, they re-reversed that same decision this week.) The company notoriously went all-in on a dozen live-service games, only to cancel most of them after the generational flop of Concord. Remember back in 2019, when Jim Ryan told Game Informer that handheld gaming was “a business that we’re no longer in now”? Now that Nintendo’s run away with the generation, that statement hasn’t aged so well. Anyway, a lot can change in a year or two.