Discs? DISCS? Where we’re going, we don’t need no discs
Sony has had quite the fortnight. First it announced that 551 Studio Canal films and TV shows will be removed from PlayStation video libraries — including from the libraries of people who paid for them — on 1 September 2026. Then, on 1 July, it announced that from January 2028 it will stop producing physical discs entirely for new PlayStation games. It’s probably about time we reviewed our consumer laws protecting users against the deletion of games, books and movies — any digital media — from our respective online accounts by the digital store owners, the distributors, or even the copyright owners.
A couple of points worth being precise about, because they make the situation worse, not better. Sony actually stopped selling and renting films on the PlayStation Store back in 2021 — so these aren’t titles being withdrawn from sale; they’re being clawed back out of libraries people already bought into. The removal affects the UK and Europe (US users apparently get to keep theirs), covers the likes of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Total Recall, Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, Hot Fuzz, Paddington 2 and Pan’s Labyrinth, and comes with precisely zero refunds or compensation. Sony’s notice blames “content licensing agreements” and leaves it at that. And this isn’t even the first time: Sony pulled the same Studio Canal trick in Germany and Austria in 2022, and in December 2023 announced the removal of purchased Discovery TV content (later walked back after a monumental backlash).
The “You will own nothing and like it” era
In this modern age of digital content, consumed immediately on demand across different platforms, we’ve reached the point where convenience outweighs ownership and the (in)ability to keep a non-tangible product even if it’s no longer being sold. Violate the terms and conditions of your Amazon, Sony, Microsoft or Google account? Anything you’ve “bought” will be wiped forever. Distributor or publisher goes bust? Your movie or book vanishes from your online library. Licensing terms change and titles get pulled? Same result. The PlayStation End User Agreement — like most digital storefronts’ terms — says outright that you’re buying a licence to view content, revocable when the underlying licensing deal expires. The word “purchase” on the button is doing an enormous amount of dishonest work.
This happened to me with the film Attila Marcel by Sylvain Chomet, an excellent French film from the director of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. I had bought a copy on Apple TV and it vanished without warning a year or two after purchase. I approached Apple for a refund; they refused. Apparently the distributor went bust. If the movie had been downloaded to my Mac, I’d have been able to keep watching — but when you have over 500 movies in your collection, storing all of them locally is a bit of a pain in the arse. Apple doesn’t exactly go out of its way to let you archive your digital content, especially movies: anything with “iTunes Extras” can’t be downloaded at all. It’s all streamed.
Ironically, Attila Marcel was still available to buy on Amazon Prime for about four months after Apple removed their copy. I went and bought the DVD instead. If I were a more sensible person, I’d buy a Blu-ray drive for the Mac and rip my collection into a format I can play on any of my devices. But that remains technically illegal under UK copyright law: the private-copying exception introduced in 2014 was quashed by the High Court in 2015, so format-shifting your own legally purchased discs is once again unlawful. Woefully behind the times.
By making all content digital, we’re heading for a world where shops like CeX — anywhere you can buy second-hand DVDs, Blu-rays and games — eventually disappear as everything transitions to strict rights control. You won’t be able to share, sell or give away your copy of a film, game or book unless the digital rights management system deigns to let you. And piracy, I’m sure, will only increase as a result. Judging by the reaction to the Studio Canal news online, plenty of people have already reached the same conclusion.
Better digital rights for consumers
I want to see the law — especially UK law — enshrine consumer protections into digital purchases so that none of the digital store owners, their partners or third-party sellers can remove content that has been “purchased”.
If your account is closed for whatever reason, any purchased content must be transferred to a similar service elsewhere — and a statutory right to port purchased digital goods between services should be available to all consumers.
If a distributor removes content from a store (again, for whatever reason), it must remain available to download from that store — or another — without charge to the consumer. If that’s not possible, reasonable compensation must be paid. “Due to our content licensing agreements” should not be a magic incantation that makes your money disappear.
Obviously there need to be reasonable provisions for the stores and rights owners in all this. Video game platforms come and go: we’re on the PS5 (and PS5 Pro) now, and analysts reckon Sony’s January 2028 disc cut-off all but confirms the PS6 won’t arrive before 2028. How long Sony and developers will support previous generations has to be considered. On the other hand, there are still developers out there writing new 8-bit games for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, so “the platform is old” isn’t much of an excuse either.
The empire strikes back
What I fear for the future is that the terminology quietly changes to protect the tech companies and rights owners — “purchase” and “buy” rebranded as “long-term rental” or “indefinite licence”, which means exactly what it means now: content can be removed for whatever reason, with no compensation. And I suspect they’d backdate it, so anything you’ve already bought remains liable for removal regardless of any new laws introduced. Sony has, in a sense, already done the rebranding retroactively — the EULA said “licence” all along; it’s just the shop front that said “buy”.
Monopoly money
Which brings me to pricing, because digital-only doesn’t just mean you can lose the game — it means you can’t shop around for it in the first place. If a game exists only as a download on PlayStation, there is exactly one shop in the entire world that sells it: the PlayStation Store. Sony sets the price, and Sony’s contracts require publishers to sell exclusively through its store and hand over a 30% commission on every sale. Compare that with discs, where Amazon, the supermarkets and the specialist shops all compete and undercut each other. Sony understood this perfectly well, which is presumably why in 2019 it banned third-party retailers from selling full-game digital download codes — eliminating the last channel through which any competitive price pressure could reach a PlayStation digital purchase. (A US class action over precisely that move was settled for $7.85 million, with no admission of wrongdoing, naturally.)
And this isn’t just me grumbling: it’s currently before the courts. The Alex Neill v Sony claim at the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal — brought on behalf of around 11 million UK consumers over purchases made between August 2016 and February 2026 — alleges that Sony abused its dominant position by blocking all competition on the PlayStation Store, allowing it to overcharge for digital games and add-ons by around 20%. The claimants’ benchmark is telling: physical copies of the same games, sold in a competitive retail market, averaged about 20% cheaper than their digital equivalents. Estimated damages come to roughly £182 per class member — about £2 billion all in. The ten-week trial (the longest of its kind) concluded in May 2026 and the Tribunal is now deliberating. Sony’s defence is that it competes with Xbox and Nintendo at the console level, and that its commission subsidises cheap hardware; the claimants’ rather compelling response is that nobody standing in Argos can calculate a console’s lifetime digital game costs before buying it.
Nor is the UK alone: a parallel Dutch case on behalf of 1.7 million gamers reckons the digital premium there runs to 47% over physical, with further actions under way in Portugal and Australia. And there’s precedent for this sort of thing going badly for the platform holder: the Tribunal ruled against Apple over its 30% App Store commission, to the tune of £1.5 billion.
All this sits alongside Rockstar confirming that the “physical” edition of Grand Theft Auto VI contains no disc at all — the box holds only a download code, at full price ($79.99 standard, $99.99 Ultimate). Boxed copies go on sale on 12 November so buyers can pre-load ahead of the 19 November launch. Take-Two’s CEO denied “no physical version” reports back in February, and technically he wasn’t lying: there is a box. There’s just a piece of paper in it. Reports differ on whether a proper disc edition ever follows — Rockstar support has vaguely promised a “physical copy” in “the following months”, while a source told The Hollywood Reporter that no discs are planned at launch or after. A couple of specialist retailers have refused to stock it on principle.
To be fair, digital distribution has genuine benefits. There’s not much need to pre-order beyond letting your internet connection breathe while the content downloads ahead of launch day, rather than fighting a clogged-up ISP whose traffic on 19 November will consist mainly of GTA VI downloads. Developers can patch installed games readily. You’re not limited by physical media sizes — and indeed Rockstar has cited the sheer size of GTA VI as one justification for skipping the disc. Sony and its associates haven’t pushed optical disc capacities since UHD Blu-ray, as ecosystem after ecosystem goes fully digital. Leak prevention is the other obvious motive: no discs in warehouses means no street-date breaks. None of which explains why the code-in-a-box costs the same as the download.
Is physical media use actually increasing?
Here I have to be more careful than some of the headlines. A widely shared TechRadar piece quoted a manufacturing agency, Key Production Group, reporting a 10,000% increase in their own Blu-ray orders — over the past eight to ten years, and particularly in Blu-ray Audio. That’s one company’s order book, not the market. The broader picture from the ERA’s December 2025 figures is that physical video overall is still declining, but Blu-ray itself grew by around 3% — a genuine reversal after years of grim numbers, driven substantially by 4K/UHD steelbooks and special editions, which accounted for roughly £2 of every £10 spent on 4K Blu-ray in 2025. Vinyl, of course, continues its long resurgence. And nobody has told the Criterion Collection that Blu-ray is dead: they continue to release beautifully restored films on disc with all manner of cool features.
So no, physical media isn’t booming across the board — but the premium, collector-driven end of it is demonstrably alive, and every “purchased content will be removed from your library” email Sony sends out is free advertising for it.
In any event, I still say we need better consumer protection laws for digital media, because I will not allow the likes of Sony and their chums to take away content I paid for because licensing agreements or rights have expired. That’s not a me problem, that’s a YOU problem, Sony. And you will damn well fix it if you want to keep my custom — though I’m reminded of Mr. Prosser in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, asking Arthur Dent how much damage the bulldozer would suffer if he just let it roll straight over him: “None at all.”
