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It's hard to look at the gaming industry right now and feel anything but despair.
AI is driving up the cost of components, and gamers are copping it from every angle. Steam is pricing its Steam Machine at $1,609 as a starting price, without a controller, and Xbox has pushed console prices up again. Microsoft is shutting studios and cancelling games to manage the fallout.
And today, Sony landed a 1-2 punch that signals the end of the physical media era, and exactly why that's bad news for anyone who isn't wealthy.
The end of physical media
Sony announced it's shuttering the PlayStation Store for PS Vita and PS3. From July 2027, you won't be able to buy new games for either platform digitally, though redownloading what you've already bought should still work for a while.
That's not surprising on its own. The PS3 was superseded by the PS4 almost 13 years ago, and the Vita, brilliant as it was, got left behind fast by the rise of mobile gaming. Sony is a big company, and big companies don't make decisions on a whim. This is a data call, and the data on Vita and PS3 purchases is probably pretty thin these days.
What matters more is the second announcement: from January 2028, Sony will stop producing games on physical media entirely. After that, digital download is your only option.
That's the real story, because it closes off the one workaround that made the store closures survivable. When a digital storefront disappears, you can usually still track down a physical copy secondhand. Once there's no physical copy to find, that option is gone too. Combine the two announcements and you lose both the ability to buy new digital copies of old games and the ability to buy old physical copies at all.
Going by the typical console life cycle, January 2028 is also a strong hint about the PS6. Analysts are pointing to a late 2028 launch, and Sony already tested the water by making the disc drive optional on the PS5 Slim. Dropping the optical drive entirely would trim manufacturing costs a little, but nobody should expect that saving to make the next console cheap.
Software and storage are climbing too
GTA VI, the biggest game of the decade, was confirmed at an RRP of $129.95 for the standard edition in Australia. The bigger surprise was that the console box version doesn't come with a disc at all, just a download code. It's the canary in the coal mine nobody was watching for.
For context: GTA V launched in 2013 with pre-order prices as low as $87.95. GTA IV launched in 2008 with an RRP of $119.95. Against that history, $129.95 doesn't look outrageous on its own. But that price no longer includes the cost of physical media, and that's before you factor in what it costs to actually store the game.
That's the part of the digital-only shift nobody talks about enough. Once every game is a download, you need somewhere to put it, and thanks to AI demand, SSD prices are through the roof.
My launch PS5 has an 825GB drive with four games installed: my son's playing Oblivion, my daughter's on Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and we've got FC26 taking up space too. When I wanted to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard a couple of months back, something had to go. I ended up installing the smaller Immortals Fenix Rising instead, because nothing else would fit.
Upgrading to 1TB, barely an upgrade at all, costs at least $200 for a no-name brand off Amazon. A 1TB WD Black SSD is over $500 at JB Hi-Fi. A 4TB drive, which would be enough for 30-odd games, will set you back a minimum of $600 right now.
Add it all up
A console costs around $1,000. A premium game costs over $100. Storage, which digital-only gaming makes compulsory, costs hundreds more on top of that.
None of these are one-off costs either: they stack every generation, every big release, every time your drive fills up.
At some point that stops being a hobby with a high entry cost and starts being a hobby that's simply out of reach for most people.
But I think we might already be past that point.
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