Sony’s digital-only plans are awful and the PS5 refund system is the worst part

After next year PlayStation 5 games will never be released on discs again, and buying a game will mean you no longer own it, just a license to play it, but is there any way to force Sony into a U-turn?

Although Wednesday’s annoucement from Sony came out of the blue, the all-digital future has been on the horizon for a long while. We talked about it in-depth when Rockstar Games announced there’d be no disc version of GTA 6 and lamented that, unlike most other anti-consumer policies in the games industry, most gamers have been welcoming of digital downloads.

Given how upset everyone is at the moment, it’s not impossible to imagine Sony doing some kind of U-turn, but at best it will be a weak promise to produce a small number of discs for collectors. With some publishers stating that digital downloads account for over 90% of their sales, the situation is too far gone for any kind of healthy equilibrium between physical and digital sales. Not when many gamers haven’t bought a physical game in years and downloads are more profitable for publishers.

The argument we made in our previous article is that the war has already been lost and GTA 6 was just underlining that fact, even before Sony made their annoucement this week. But there’s a lot more going on here than just being sad that the old way of buying games has gone, because now Sony is poised to upset more than just a niche group of physical media collectors.

By giving up on physical copies of video games, Sony will be causing significant change to more than just the games industry. Not only is Sony responsible for pressing the discs for all games released on PlayStation 5, whether published by them or not, they’re also one of the key forces behind Blu-ray technology. So by backing away from physical discs for games it puts into question the collectible movie and TV market as well – especially as most people no longer own a separate Blu-ray player and just use a console instead.

The music industry might still entertain a collector’s market, via vinyl, but the entire concept of owning and collecting physical video games and films has been shattered with a single blog post. It’s a bold move on Sony’s part but it seems likely that they have not thought through the full ramifications of their annoucement. Not in terms of the outraged fans (they will have anticipated at least some level of anger) but how their decision undermines the entire purpose of owning a PlayStation console.

There may be a few reasons for the announcement’s timing but it’s likely that the main purpose was to lance the boil now, while everyone is looking forward to the already digital-only GTA 6 and the PlayStation 6 is but a distant rumour. Sony and Rockstar must have already communicated their plans to each other, given how involved Sony is in GTA 6’s marketing, and they’ll both be very keen to avoid a similar disaster to the unveiling of the Xbox One in 2013.

Back then Microsoft advocated for an essentially digital-only console and Sony was gifted the entire generation (and you could argue the entire high-end console business) by making it very clear that they were not digital-only and you could still sell and borrow games simply by exchanging discs as usual.

A lot has changed in 13 years and now the second-hand games market is all but dead, Sony has decided now is the time to make good on Microsoft’s original vision. Given what’s happened this week, it’s clear the PlayStation 6 will not have a disc drive (perhaps one will be sold as an optional add-on but that’s all you can hope for) while Sony also seems to be gearing up for the concept of streaming video games, where any last hint of game ownership will be completely erased.

Like all video game companies, Sony makes some baffling decisions sometimes (why on earth did they announce the closure of the PlayStation 3 and PS Vita stores at the same time as going all-digital, thereby giving a clear example of the pitfalls of the concept?) but suddenly the timing of the previous annoucement, about pulling support from the PC market, makes a lot more sense.

Following Wednesday’s revelations many gamers insisted they would abandon the PlayStation ecosystem entirely and switch to PC, since there was no longer any practical difference – and given the PC offers advantages such as cheaper games and mod support. That is definitely a valid choice, but Sony has already said that they won’t be releasing any of their single-player games on PC anymore, so if you ditch the PlayStation you will be missing out on them.

Given the painfully slow release schedules of this generation that’s not quite the issue it would’ve been during the PlayStation 4 era but, beyond the general pain of moving to a new ecosystem, the benefits of PlayStation console gaming are considerably less obvious than a decade or so ago.

There’s one issue that is set to make the whole situation even worse though and that’s PlayStation’s awful refund policy, which only allows refunds within 14 days if you haven’t already started downloading the game. How they’ve got away with that for so long is a mystery, especially since Steam has a far more generous policy, that allow you to experience two hours of gameplay before you decide you don’t like it.

Unless Sony changes their refund policy you’re looking at a dystopian future where not only do you pay a fortune to play a game you never actually own, but if you realise you’ve made a mistake, and regret your purchase, you have no easy way to get your money back. For decades now, publishers have been trying to kill off the second-hand games market and training customers not to value ownership, or expect the normal consumer protections they have for physical goods; all so a digital-only hegemony can take root.

The all-digital future may have been inevitable but it’s been ushered in as quickly as possible, purely for the benefit of publishers, who want to make the maximum amount of profit out of you, their customers, while ensuring you have no alternative but to buy from them, and only them, while enduring their draconian business practices. If the outrage of the initial reactions continues, and becomes focused on the refund policy, then perhaps some concessions can be won, but the future of console gaming has never seemed so bleakly anti-consumer.

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