Sony Will Stop Pressing Discs in 2028 and Is Closing the PS3 and Vita Stores

The Announcement

Sony has confirmed it will discontinue physical disc production for all new PlayStation games from January 2028. After that date, new releases go out digitally through the PlayStation Store or as digital codes at retail. Games released before January 2028 are unaffected, so existing discs keep working. In the same announcement Sony set out a staggered shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita storefronts: Mexico, Honduras and Nicaragua from August 2026, further Latin American and Middle Eastern territories from late 2026, and everywhere else in July 2027.

What Goes Away

Estimates put the combined digital-only catalogue across PS3, Vita and PSP at roughly 2,200 titles. These are games that were never pressed to a disc or card, which means that when the storefront closes there is no legal way to obtain them, and no legal way for an archive to hold them either. Tom's Hardware summarised the disc half of the announcement as Sony "officially killing the PlayStation disc," which is blunt but hard to argue with.

The Preservation Response

The Video Game History Foundation responded within days, calling on the industry to "offer meaningful solutions for archives and museums to legally preserve digital-only content and make it accessible for research." VGHF director Frank Cifaldi was pointed about the trade body: "We have attempted to work with the industry's trade organization to find a legal path forward, but they refuse to offer a meaningful alternative." The ESA has repeatedly opposed the DMCA exemptions that would let libraries provide remote access to preserved games.

The Uncomfortable Part

Cifaldi also made an argument the disc-collecting side of the hobby tends to skip past: most games of the last two decades were never built for dedicated home consoles or physical media in the first place, and even the ones that shipped on disc frequently shipped broken and were fixed by a day one patch. The disc in the case may not contain the game anyone actually played. Coverage widely read VGHF's position as an admission that piracy is currently the only functioning form of game preservation, which is not a comfortable conclusion for anyone, including the people making it.

Sources: Tom's Hardware, VGC