Sony is set to leave physical games behind, so regular people have taken matters into their own hands and concocted new ways to turn digital games into physical ones.
The announcement that Sony will no longer be releasing physical PlayStation games after 2027 still has people irate, angrily blasting the company across social media and in the comments under any new videos posted to the PlayStation YouTube channel.
It’s a move that has much wider ramifications than just the PlayStation 6 potentially being a digital-only console, as it further highlights how you don’t really own any digital games you buy.
That’s why some people are looking into ways to convert their digital libraries into physical ones; a service that something called Kazeta is more than happy to provide.
Kazeta was brought to our attention recently by a reader and is the creation of Alesh Slovak. Essentially, it’s a custom operating system you can download onto your PC and use to turn your digital PC games into physical cartridges.
You do need to supply the cartridges yourself, but Kazeta’s website states that SD cards and other forms of physical media are compatible.
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It also promises compatibility with almost any game, including ones available on GOG, itch.io, and even through emulation… so long as they don’t have DRM (digital rights management, aka anti-piracy security software).
The process may be a bit technical for some, but the website offers installation guides and walkthroughs since Kazeta is trying to market itself to not just dedicated gamers but anyone ‘intimidated by modern gaming’ and ‘kids who need a safe, offline environment.’
Kazeta isn’t the only example of this either. Someone on Reddit by the name of Jibril-sama has built their own system that lets them download Steam games onto physical cartridges, which they can plug into a drive dock to automatically launch the game on their PC.
They’ve even made their system public for anyone else to download, although the obvious drawback is needing to supply your own cartridges for storage, which could be costly – especially given the current component crisis.
When asked why they went to the trouble, Jibril-sama explained, ‘I have a bunch of games that I want to replay once in a while. I don’t want to keep them on my main drive constantly,’ adding that this isn’t the perfect substitute to having actual digital ownership rights.
It’s possible Sony could have alleviated some of the blowback it’s getting had it announced its own service like this, where people could convert digital PlayStation games onto a disc if they wanted to.
Although it’s extremely unlikely they will, since Sony has already begun restructuring its main disc production factory into making something else.
Xbox could take this as an opportunity to foster goodwill and commit to physical media, but no doubt it’ll follow Sony’s example and move to only releasing digital games.
According to The Verge, Xbox is currently testing a feature that turns physical games into digital ones, rather than the other way around. Should Project Helix be a digital-only console, this feature would allow people to still access their physical games on the newer hardware.
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