A group of gamers are calling for everyone to stop playing their PlayStation consoles for a week, as the fury continues around Sony’s decision to kill off physical discs.
Sony’s decision to stop producing PlayStation game discs after 2027 might seem irreversible, but it hasn’t stopped some gamers from kicking up a stink in protest.
We’ve already seen an online petition rack up over 340,000 signatures and now fans are looking to stage a ‘blackout’, whereby willing participants will turn off their PlayStation consoles for a week, from August 23 to August 30.
The protest is designed to hurt PlayStation’s active player metric, with organisers encouraging ‘no logins, no play sessions, and no purchases on any of Sony’s platforms’.
In a statement on social media, organisers DoesItPlay1 says Sony has ‘continued to grow further apart from its fan base’ over the PlayStation 5 generation, citing live service games, the closure of Bluepoint, and the absence of historic franchises like Twisted Metal and Sly Cooper.
‘Ending physical discs in 2028 feels like the last straw,’ the statement adds. ‘We understand there is only so much Sony Interactive Entertainment can control, but with the decisions that are within its control, the company continues to mismanage the strong position it inherited from the PlayStation 4 era.
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‘There are so many issues with PlayStation right now that bringing back physical games would only be meeting players halfway.’
A protest like this would spook Sony if millions of players tuned out in unison, but it’d have to dip the player count significantly – and for an extended period – to get the company’s attention. At the moment, the post on X has over 4,500 shares and 13,000 likes, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall PlayStation player base.
The awkward truth is the decline of physical games is largely down to the buying habits of gamers, with digital sales far surpassing physical. It benefits Sony to abandon physical discs sooner rather than later, and the decision will be detrimental to consumers overall, but it will probably take more than unplugging a console for a week to reverse it.
Rockstar Games co-founder and lead GTA writer Dan Houser, who left the company in 2020, recently discussed the issue in an interview, where he said that companies should provide the option of buying games on a disc for those who want it.
‘I don’t know that I care, but if people want that, I think companies should provide it,’ Houser told IGN. ‘But I don’t know that I personally care. And I also think that the ability to update games – as critical as people are of digital releases – the ability to update and fix problems in games has been really useful for the quality of games.’
Houser goes on to explain that, while he ‘loves’ physical media at large, there are perks to buying digitally.
‘I mean, we all have that sort of feeling when you get that copy and you put the disc in the console,’ he added. ‘But I also have to say I really like being at the airport and going ‘oh cool, I can download some quick games to my Steam Deck for this 12 hour flight’.’
For GTA 6, Rockstar is ditching discs in favour of download codes, in what will be one of the first major games to skip the format entirely.
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