I was in the darkened theatre when Hideo Kojima turned a conversation about cinema into a warning for anyone who owns a shelf. You could feel the temperature of the room drop. It made a corporate memo feel like a personal loss.
I’ve followed Kojima for years, and when he says he’s “really sad” about Sony’s plan to stop producing discs after January 2028, I listen. You should too—because this isn’t just nostalgia talking. It’s a forecast about control: who holds the file, and who decides when it vanishes.
At the Il Cinema in Piazza festival, Kojima said he grew up with physical media.
He told the crowd he’s been buying Blu-rays and CDs, that discs felt like ownership. Then he framed Sony’s move—no new game discs for titles released after 2028—as a hinge-point for an industry shift.
There are already signs: Sony is repurposing disc factories and downsizing supply chains. I’ve watched similar closures before in music and film. When a medium is treated like an expendable line item, your ability to hold what you paid for can vanish faster than you expect—like a library being quietly sealed.
Why is Sony ending physical disc production?
Because the math favors digital: distribution costs drop, margins climb, and streaming ties customers to recurring revenue. You may hear executives cite convenience and environmental reasons; those are part of the story. The rest is plain finance—companies chase predictable income and lower logistics headaches, and physical runs afoul of that model.
That matters because owning a disc is not just about reading data off a plate. It’s about rights, longevity, and the fallback if servers or storefronts change strategy. With streaming, you rent access. With a disc, you hold a copy.
At the panel he warned streaming could let someone “turn off the tap” on your media.
Kojima put it bluntly: streaming makes you dependent on servers and subscriptions. If licensing, politics, or business decisions change, access can disappear.
This isn’t hypothetical. Films leave Netflix; tracks vanish from music services. Games can be delisted, servers shut. If streaming becomes the primary or sole distribution method, what you “own” becomes contingent on a remote decision—something I’ve seen happen in other corners of entertainment, and it’s unnerving.
Can I still own my games after 2028?
If you buy a physical disc before production ends, yes—that’s ownership in the most literal sense. If you rely on digital storefronts or subscription libraries, ownership is a license that can be revoked or altered. I recommend you think about redundancy: backups, archival copies, and checking publisher policies before you trust a single platform.
Game Pass and PlayStation Plus already show two models: subscription libraries and lifetime purchases. The former can remove titles without notice; the latter still depends on platform policy. Your choices now shape what you can access later.
At the intersection of movies and games, industry patterns repeat themselves.
Kojima was on a film panel with directors like Gaspar Noé, and he made a point about movies for a reason: streaming erases formats across media. Blu-ray and vinyl persisted in film and music, but consoles have historically been more disc-dependent. That weak spot is now being closed.
Think about it: studios, platforms, and publishers—Sony included—are aligning incentives toward services that keep money flowing. You can oppose it publicly, but corporations respond most clearly to spending. Make your wallet count if you want formats to stick around.
I don’t say this to cheerlead resistance; I say it because you should be aware of what ownership looks like in 2026 and beyond. There are tools and platforms—Blu-ray collectors, indie distributors, archival projects—that help preserve physical formats, and there are subscription services like Netflix and Amazon that exemplify the risks Kojima described.
I’m not asking you to worship discs; I’m asking you to pay attention to what ownership will mean when servers and subscriptions sit between you and your media. If you care about permanence, buy, back up, and push publishers for clearer guarantees.
And if you don’t care, that’s a decision too—market forces listen to wallets. Will you let yours be the loudest voice?