Ever since Sony announced plans to do away with physical discs for new PlayStation games from 2028 onwards, angry gamers have flooded the company’s social media platforms to demand a U-turn. This in turn has overshadowed PlayStation’s online activity — spare a thought for the people who found themselves bearing the brunt of the backlash just because they were in PlayStation’s first social media post since the disc-killing announcement.
Now, great new games are getting caught in the crossfire. The digital-only Denshattack!, from indie developer Undercoders, launched yesterday, and PlayStation promoted the release across its social media channels. This is a game with rave reviews (IGN’s Denshattack! review returned a 9/10), and it deserves its moment in the sun. But unfortunately Sony’s decision to kill physical discs has cast a long shadow on all things PlayStation — and core gamers won’t let this one go.
Some are using PlayStation’s Denshattack! ‘out today on PS5’ social media post as a jumping off point to call for people to boycott its release on Sony’s console, pushing for people to buy it elsewhere (it’s also out on PC, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X and S).
“DO NOT PLAY THIS ON PS5!” declared fighting game content creator Avataryaya in a QT viewed over 700,000 times. “It’s also out today with a stellar PC port, and a locked 60 on Switch 2! Buy it elsewhere!” another said.
“Genuine banger games are being released that are being buried/lambasted by your awful decision,” another said in a tweet viewed over 100,000 times. “Your silence is not just spitting in your fans faces, but now is ACTIVELY affecting the launch of a DIGITAL game :)! Will be buying this on Switch instead of PS.”
The many replies to PlayStation’s Denshattack! post are just as vociferous. “Stomp bosses is what everyone at PlayStation should have done when the attack on physical media and gaming culture was announced,” the Does it play? Twitter account, which is at the heart of the online backlash, replied. “This will have catastrophic consequences for the gaming industry and beyond. Short-term profit isn’t worth it. Hope you realize before it’s too late.”
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Only Sony will know if the online backlash ends up affecting Denshattack! on PlayStation in commercial terms, and I imagine the developers at Undercoders will just want people to enjoy their game wherever they think best. But it’s hardly ideal to see Denshattack!’s PlayStation release caught up in the backlash simply because of unfortunate timing. With no Sony U-turn in sight, developers releasing new games on PlayStation will probably have to accept that they’ll likely see the same sort of reaction Denshattack! is getting, at least for the foreseeable future.
Inevitably, we come to the question that has been asked for weeks now: will Sony reverse its decision? Every analyst we’ve spoken to about this has said there’s no chance. Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games, suggested that even if half a million people cancelled their PlayStation Plus subscription in protest, it would be just a drop in the ocean for Sony — which is not going to change its mind.
“I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision,” Toto told IGN. “They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.
“Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users,” he continued. “Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let’s say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough for Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative.”
For Sony, going all-digital for new game releases will earn it more money from every sale at a time when console sales are expected to plummet due to their rising cost. For a first-party PlayStation game such as The Last of Us, Sony will only keep around 65% of the money from a physical copy, with around 30% going to the retailer and roughly another 5% on manufacturing costs. Meanwhile, for a physical copy of a third-party game such as the Activision-published Call of Duty, Sony will get a licensing fee, likely around 15%.
For downloads, however, the margins are much higher. For a first-party game sold via Sony’s own PlayStation Store, the company obviously keeps 100% of the revenue. For third-party games such as Call of Duty, meanwhile, Sony keeps a 30% cut (so, roughly $21 for a $70 game).
Piers Harding-Rolls, games industry analyst at Ampere, has said the data backs this up, and that a lot has changed over the course of the last two generations. “Console gaming is the last hold-out for physical media in the gaming sector, but physical product has been declining in importance,” he said in a post on the Ampere website. “Back in 2013 when the PS4 launched, Ampere data shows that only 13% of total full games unit sales for Sony consoles were digital (including digital-only games). Fast forward to 2025, and this digital share of full game purchases stood at almost 80% of the total.
“Inevitably there will be concerns from PlayStation gamers around various aspects of this announcement including choice, accessing older physical games on new consoles, the ability to collect physical games, and game preservation, however the purchasing trends of gamers are clear.”
One analyst said fans of physical media had their chance and blew it, so there’s no going back. “If gamers and preservationists had bought more physical games, Sony wouldn’t have seen the digital sales ratios that justify this decision,” Robin Zhu, a games analyst at Bernstein, told the Financial Times.
“Digital game sales carry essentially 100% incremental margin… the cost of the physical package, shipping and retailer margins can be more than 20% per cent of sticker price.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.