Clair Obscur geliştiricileri, Sony'nin disk satışından çekilmesini 'üzücü bir karar' olarak nitelendirdi.

Sandfall Interactive did not plan on entering the disc argument, but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made the studio hard to skip when reporters started asking. In an interview with Automaton, CEO and creative director Guillaume Broche said several people on the team play on PS5 and still collect physical discs, and that losing the option costs players more than a format choice.

"it's a sad decision"

— Guillaume Broche

Broche tied the sadness to something less practical than sales figures, the feeling of a shelf full of games a player can point to and say they own. He said he understands the business case for going digital, but framed the shift as a loss for the artistic side of the medium rather than a neutral operational change.

CTO and co-founder Tom Guillermin took a more practical line. Physical releases add production lead time and shave margin off every copy sold, he said, yet Sandfall pushed for a boxed release anyway, betting the game would mean more to players holding it than sitting in a download queue. Lead character and concept artist Alan Reynaud described the same instinct on a smaller scale: catching sight of Clair Obscur on a store shelf still catches him off guard months after release, and he called walking out of a store with a physical copy a good feeling worth keeping around.

I'm still sorting out my own PS5 library, so the shelf-versus-license question isn't abstract to me the way it might read from outside.

Politics caught up to the argument within days. French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon used his platform to frame Sony's plan as a rights issue rather than a business decision, pointing to both the 2028 disc cutoff and GTA 6 shipping without a disc option as proof that game ownership is changing shape without anyone voting on it.

"Videogames are not mere merchandise, they are cultural assets."

— Jean-Luc Mélenchon

He backed a Change.org petition making the same argument: a fully digital model turns a game purchase into a revocable right of access instead of something a buyer actually keeps. GTA 6 arrives on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19, and Rockstar has already confirmed it will skip physical discs entirely, giving critics a high-profile example to point to.

The complaint is not limited to Europe. Japanese devs still push back on the plan inside Sony's own market. Sega president Shuji Utsumi told Famitsu the company still values physical media even as it leans harder into digital, while Disgaea creator Sohei Niikawa argued that if Sony is willing to drop discs, it should drop the console too and just sell buyers a television. Hideo Kojima added his own signal, reposting a years-old warning that a fully digital library can lose its access overnight, and a veteran Sony-group developer noted that skipping the disc build frees up roughly six weeks of extra polish time per game, a detail that cuts the other way in the argument.

Sony announced the cutoff on July 1: no new discs for PlayStation games starting January 2028, with sales moving entirely to the PlayStation Store and digital retail. The company has cited downloads making up about 78 percent of 2025 game sales to justify the change, and the finances back it up. Sony keeps roughly 65 percent of a physical game's price once retail and manufacturing costs come out, against close to the full price on a digital sale, and its share on third-party digital titles improves as well.

There's a reason the announcement landed with the sting it did. Former God of War Laufey writer Alanah Pearce said colleagues across PlayStation's first-party studios described the social media guidelines circulated around the disc news as the strictest they had ever worked under, a lockdown she read as proof that Sony knew about gamers' reaction long before the post went live. Sony made the call the same day it closed the PS3 and PS Vita stores, and shortly before quietly deleting more than 550 purchased movies from customer libraries without refunds, two decisions that made the trust argument easier for critics already primed to distrust the company's digital promises.

The backlash has since organized itself around a date. A group of PlayStation community creators announced the #PSBlackout protest, asking players to stay off PlayStation Network and skip PS5 purchases entirely from August 23 through August 30, while also pushing Sony to revive dormant franchises such as Twisted Metal, SOCOM, and Sly Cooper. The Change.org petition backing the wider cause has climbed past 345,000 signatures, and anger has spread onto releases that had nothing to do with the decision, including a recent Marvel's Wolverine trailer where disc complaints buried comments about the game itself.

The timing has not helped Sony's argument that digital ownership works fine. A PlayStation Network outage on July 24 locked players out of their accounts and blocked access to games they had already downloaded, landing in the exact stretch Sony needed digital trust to hold. Three days later, an Xbox outage did the same thing to Microsoft's players, cutting off sign-ins and blanking libraries for disc-based and backward-compatible titles alike, evidence that the failure mode critics describe is not tied to one company's disc policy. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet later said a licensing service outside Xbox's own systems had failed, breaking the ownership checks that confirm what a player is allowed to launch.

An outage that locks someone out of a library they already paid for is the scenario that would actually change how I think about buying games digitally, more than a developer's quote or a politician's petition ever could.

Analysts still expect Sony to ride the anger out. Kantan Games consultant Serkan Toto has pointed to Sony's scale, more than 120 million active PlayStation users and roughly 50 million PlayStation Plus subscribers, as a reason to expect even a large wave of cancellations to barely register. EU consumer protection commissioner Michael McGrath has said the bloc lacks the legal grounds to force Sony to keep selling discs, calling distribution a matter of commercial freedom. Nintendo has taken the opposite path on Switch 2, keeping physical releases in the form of game-key cards and pricing digital versions roughly ten dollars cheaper, a middle ground Sony has shown no interest in matching.

Sandfall's discomfort and Mélenchon's petition sit on opposite ends of the same complaint: one side misses the object itself, the other distrusts the terms attached to not having it. Sony has given no sign that either argument will move the January 2028 deadline.