On July 25, 2026 (pretty much yesterday), the whole PlayStation Network went down for a couple of hours. Now, that’s not anything strange, but it comes at a time when SONY announced that they are removing physical copies by 2028. People are collectively laughing and worrying about this situation.
What is the impact of this recent outage?
The system going down only lasted for a few hours; however, that demonstrates why it is bad when physical copies will be gone in the future.
People can’t access their games.
Unlike having a physical copy where you can place the disk inside and play it, you can’t do that here. Your library of games, the games you bought, cannot be played while the network is down. You’ll be idle and twiddling your thumbs until it goes back online. That’s not an issue if you have something else to do, but what about other people? It’s the weekend, there’s no school or no work, you want to play, then boom, the network is down, and you can’t do anything about it.
A potential problem for a future with no physical copies
While the network going out can be a big problem, there are other factors as to why the lack of physical copies can be bad in the world of video games. These are just a few reasons why people are scared of this situation.
Losing your purchases
SONY recently removed a lot of videos, TV shows, movies, and more from their network. These were legally paid for by the people, and they just lost access to them. SONY states that licensing agreements from the owners of these media didn’t want to renew.
Think about this in the future where you can lose access to your games. These games that you paid for, and since there’s no physical copy, you cannot play your game, since you don’t have it anymore. That’s dangerous when SONY or the publishers of these games can do that.
Price gouging
If the games are only in digital, then there’s a chance that SONY can manipulate the prices. What that means is they can just change or force publishers to manipulate the price. You’re stuck with the prices and will be forced to buy them or not. Regardless, that’s a bleak situation when the prices can be fixed for games on the SONY market.
No more used market
When you don’t have physical copies, what can you trade? You can’t sell or pass on your games with everything being on digital. Plus, it’s doubtful that SONY will allow people to share their games to other accounts. It would be nice if you could buy a game outside of SONY and play it there or anywhere.
Final remarks
The year 2028 is still a bit far away, so that means that maybe SONY can change its mind or publishers who care can come up with some fixes to make the players’ lives a little bit easier. Let us just hope that the future looks bright and SONY will change its mind. Then again, it could just be a case of a code.