Laura Fryer, a veteran of the video game industry and one of the founding members of the original Xbox project, is sounding the alarm amidst the industry's shift toward all-digital games.
Fryer recently uploaded a new video to her YouTube channel in which she warns specifically against PlayStation's recent announcement that it's ending production of physical game discs starting in 2028. She uses a story about her family's Rock Band tradition to make a point about the impermanence of digital-only games, explaining that she once spent "hundreds of dollars on Rock Band songs" only to lose them over a licensing issue. After her original Xbox died and was replaced by a newer model, she was unable to download the songs on her working console because they had been delisted. "Eventually, we just gave up," Fryer says, tragically. "We gave up on our favorite family game."
If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've shared a similar experience with digital games over the years. Publishers have offered fully digital versions of games for decades now, and most purchases made on PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox storefronts don't come with any sort of physical token guaranteeing permanent ownership, but with PlayStation moving away from physical discs altogether, it's likely situations like Fryer's will become much more commonplace in the next console generation.
Fryer says her Rock Band story isn't just a "one-off technical glitch," but "the blueprint for what Sony is planning next. "So when people ask me what I think about Sony's recent announcement that they're going all digital, that's all I can think about."
Fryer also wades into the debate about physical's market share compared to digital, which some analysts say is as low as 10% physical vs 90% digital, but Fryer argues that the inclusion of digital-only games in those comparisons makes "digital look way more dominant than it actually is."
She also points to an old promotional video in which then-president of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida hypes up the PS4's ability to read offline discs when Xbox One's pre-launch plan was to make all games require an internet connection. These days, of course, things are different, with GTA 6, arguably the biggest game of the century, essentially going all digital. This, in Fryer's view, opened the floodgates.
"Sony waited for Rockstar to make the first move, take the heat, and now they're going all-in to make this the new normal," she says.
Fryer also makes the convincing argument that PlayStation going discless isn't just about reducing production costs for new games and hardware, claiming that it's also about erasing the second-hand market and re-gaining complete control over its ecosystem. "All the major players; Sony, Microsoft, even Hollywood; they're all aligned here. Digital kills the used market and it stops the old library from competing with new games on the next console," she says.
Ultimately, Fryer says a digital future is likely "inevitable" due to convenience, but says even a company as trusted by gamers as Valve is prone to leadership changes that could potentially result in digital libraries like the ones on Steam becoming just as vulnerable as song collections on Rock Band.
"I admit, most of my Steam library is digital too, because I trust they won't pull the games," Fryer says. "But I worry about that, because platforms depend on good leadership. Gabe Newell will not run Steam forever, and we've seen from Xbox how fast priorities can shift when you get new leadership," she adds, seemingly referring to Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's big "reset."
Wrapping up her argument against a digital-only marketplace, Fryer goes full circle with what she calls her "Rock Band warning:
"Digital is convenient until someone else decides you've had enough, and there are some games and movies where I will never have enough," she says. "Physical gives you real ownership, right? And in my case, physical would've protected those irreplaceable memories."
GamesRadar's Dustin agrees: PlayStation killing discs is bad for everyone, whether you care about physical games or not
