Sony Killed Physical Games - WAN Show July 3, 2026

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Linus Sebastian** (0:37)
What is up, everyone? And welcome to The WAN Show. Obviously, the big news this week is Sony has announced that effective January 2028, they will no longer be manufacturing physical game discs.
No, don't interrupt, this is a moment of silence. In other news this week, Valve has dropped the Dbrand Steam Machine Companion Cube case down the legal incinerator after its makers neglected to get their permission to make it. This has to be just about the most Dbrand thing ever. What else we got this week?

**Luke Lafrenière** (1:30)
Memory is a problem for everyone. Meta is using custom chips to run DDR4 in servers designed for DDR5.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:37)
Okay, it's legitimately actually really cool.

**Luke Lafrenière** (1:38)
That is, that's why, yeah, it's interesting. It's agi- unfortunately, that's really interesting right now. That's the world that we live in.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:46)
Yeah, don't make that up.

**Luke Lafrenière** (1:47)
Um, oh man, I had another one but I don't remember where it was.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:51)
Too late! Too late, I'm rolling the intro! You're out of time!

**Luke Lafrenière** (1:54)
There's a flock camera that appeared in someone's yard and they were like, what? And we're gonna talk about flock cameras again, because I feel like people should know about them.

**Linus Sebastian** (2:21)
The show is brought to you today by Factor Meals, Odoo, H-Refs and Green Man Gaming, along with our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Razer, and our chair partner, also Razer. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic this week. Sony PlayStation made waves when they announced that physical disc production will be ending in January 2028 for new games released on PlayStation consoles, and that future games will be available at retailers in digital formats only, i.e. likely download codes and boxes. After that date, developers will apparently still be able to place orders for game discs of titles that were previously released. This comes the same day as the announcement of the closure of the PlayStation 3 and Vita digital storefronts in July 2027, where the games that you purchased will remain available for download, which I guess is good, but you will no longer be able to buy any more, which is bad.
Also, this came the same week as the removal of 550 movies from Sony Pictures Core due to licensing issues. These will no longer be available to you, even if you owned them.

**Luke Lafrenière** (3:53)
What is Sony Pictures Core? Am I the only one that doesn't know what this is?

**Linus Sebastian** (3:56)
I assume it's a streaming service.

**Luke Lafrenière** (3:58)
I've never heard of it.

**Linus Sebastian** (3:59)
Sony Pictures Core.

**Luke Lafrenière** (4:00)
Entertainment app for PS4 and PS5?

**Linus Sebastian** (4:03)
Here you go, you're not a PlayStation gamer, so you don't know a way to go, Luke.

**Luke Lafrenière** (4:06)
I guess.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:07)
I didn't know what it was, either. This.

**Luke Lafrenière** (4:10)
Epic quality limitless entertainment, unless we remove a bunch of them. There's definitely a limit.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:18)
This perfect storm has resulted in huge backlash online, including multiple petitions to have Sony continue physical game releases with multiple tens of thousands of signatures, and even a lawmaker in Brazil sending a notice to a consumer protection agency asking that Sony needs to be investigated.
Despite all of this, however, Sony is unlikely to backtrack as they've been preparing this transition for quite some time, with employees reportedly already starting to test, develop and deploy new manufacturing processes for optics such as micro lenses in what used to be their disk making facilities. We have an optional neat fact here, by the way. This announcement has increased the demand for the current PS5 add-on disk drive, and Sony has limited sales to one per order. Yes, because that is, of course, the solution to a company behaving in an anti-consumer monopolistic fashion. Let's buy their stuff. Fast, quickly, quickly buy their stuff.

**Luke Lafrenière** (5:18)
As fast as we can.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:20)
All right. Discussion, question.

**Luke Lafrenière** (5:23)
There's a lot of them.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:24)
There's quite a few discussion questions. I think there's a lot to discuss here.

**Luke Lafrenière** (5:27)
I think there is.

**Linus Sebastian** (5:28)
Do you think this change will have a big impact on the sale of PlayStation consoles and games in the future?