Japanska utvecklare motsätter sig fortfarande Sonys utträde med fysisk media

The pushback against Sony's plan to kill physical PlayStation discs has picked up two heavyweight voices from its own backyard. Sega's president has come out in defense of physical media, while the creator of the Disgaea series went further, arguing that if Sony is dropping discs, it should drop the console too. Both sets of comments landed on July 24, three weeks into a controversy Sony has refused to touch.

Speaking to Famitsu, Sega president Shuji Utsumi said the publisher still holds physical media in high regard, even as it leans harder into digital. He called a digital shift crucial, pointing to the steadily growing number of people playing on PC, including in regions where consoles are hard to find.

"We were originally a platform provider, and of course, we still value the culture of physical media. Rather than completely abandoning that, we are currently challenging ourselves to shift so that we can think about and act on the important aspects of digital media in parallel."

— Shuji Utsumi

For the games Sega calls "full games" on consoles and PC, he sees a digital shift as crucial, and he wants the company to become more digitally conscious and more global rather than defaulting to a physical-first mindset, especially as PC audiences keep growing in places consoles never reached.

Recently, Hideo Kojima reposted a 2021 warning that a digital-only world can have its access cut off overnight, and veteran Sony-group developer Masami Yamamoto noted that dropping the disc build hands teams about six extra weeks of polish per game. Players mourned the second-hand shops and limited physical editions that pull many toward PlayStation over PC in the first place, and the mood soured further because Sony made the announcement the same day it closed the PS3 and PS Vita stores and just before deleting more than 550 purchased movies without refunds.

That perspective is shaped by Sega's own past. The company was once a hardware maker itself, and after leaving the console race it found far bigger success as a publisher. Utsumi framed the current moment as a balancing act, wanting Sega to grow more digitally minded and more global without walking away from the physical side entirely. It is a notably measured position next to the outright fury elsewhere.

The sharper take came from Sohei Niikawa, creator of the Disgaea RPGs, in comments spotted by Eurogamer. Speaking to Noisy Pixel at Anime Expo 2026, Niikawa said he understands the business logic but does not like it, and he suspects the executives behind the call have never stood at a convention while a fan handed them a physical game to sign.

"If they're going to go as far as eliminating physical packages, they may as well eliminate the hardware, too. A television would be enough. Why would you need the console? If you're going to get rid of physical games, you may as well go all the way."

— Sohei Niikawa

His point was less about sales than about connection: the physical copy is the thing a fan brings to be signed, the object that says a game mattered to someone. Niikawa no longer works with Nippon Ichi, the studio behind Disgaea, and is building a new strategy RPG called Demons' Night Fever with Arc System Works publishing. It keeps his trademarks, hellish imagery and absurdly large damage numbers, and is due in 2026 on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

My position on the disc question has not moved: the shift itself is an organic retreat from a format, not a betrayal of one, so I do not need Sony to un-ring the bell. What I like about Utsumi's framing is that he names the thing actually worth protecting, the culture around physical media, because the loss I care about is ownership, not the plastic. Niikawa's "then drop the hardware too" is a provocation, but it lands for me, since a closed box you only rent access to is a harder pitch than the console ever was.

The decision they are all responding to came on July 1, when Sony said it would stop producing discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028, moving to digital-only sales on the PlayStation Store and at retailers. Sony knew the backlash was coming, having reportedly handed staff their strictest-ever social media guidelines before the announcement, and it pressed ahead regardless, pointing to downloads making up about 78 percent of game sales in 2025.

On a physical first-party game, Sony keeps roughly 65 percent of the price after the retailer and manufacturing take their share; on a digital sale it keeps everything, and its cut on third-party titles improves too. Physical now makes up only about 5 percent of Sony's game software revenue, and the company earns more from add-ons and in-game purchases than from full-game sales of either kind.

A Change.org petition against the move has passed 335,000 signatures, campaigns under #BoycottSony and "No Disc, No Buy" keep spreading, and the anger has bled onto unrelated games. When Insomniac dropped the Marvel's Wolverine Trailer this month, the comments filled with disc complaints instead of praise for Logan, and posts for Marvel Tokon and PowerWash Simulator caught the same wave. On the PlayStation Blog, thousands of comments piled up within hours, many circling the same complaint about paying full price to own nothing, and calls to cancel PlayStation Plus in protest spread across social media. Fans have raised resale, gifting, game preservation, and where prices settle once a disc is no longer an option.

For all the noise, Sony has shown no sign of backing down. The European Union has said it lacks the legal grounds to force the company to keep selling discs, and analysts expect Sony to simply wait the storm out, betting that its enormous install base absorbs whatever protest cancellations come. Sega's stance stands out precisely because it is a rare public counterweight from a major Japanese publisher, even if Utsumi is careful to say digital matters too. For now, the loudest names in Japanese gaming can register their disagreement, but none of them can change Sony's math.