The Trade-In Was the Point
A few weeks ago, I walked out of GameStop with $49 in credit and put all of it toward a $70 game I'd been waiting on.
Here's how I got there. I bought Resident Evil Requiem new, played through it, and traded it back in while it was still fresh. The counter value was about $39, but I'm a Pro member, and stacking a couple of promotions—including a bonus for applying the credit to reserve an upcoming game—pushed the total to $49. So a $70 game effectively cost me $21. Not because I found a sale, but because I did the thing consoles have quietly allowed for as long as I've owned them: I sold the game back.
That's the part of gaming Sony just announced it's ending.
What actually changed
Sony confirmed that starting in January 2028, it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games. Anything released before then still exists on disc; everything after is digital-only. The reasoning is hard to argue with on its face—nearly four out of five full-game purchases on PS4 and PS5 in the past year were already digital. I'm apparently in the shrinking minority. I still buy 80% of my games on disc.
The announcement is careful about what it doesn't say. Nothing about disc drives, nothing about pricing, and nothing about the used-game market. That last one is the part I actually care about.
The used market was never really about the used market
Let me be clear about my own habit first: I don't buy used to save money. I buy new. But selling was how I managed the cost of buying new. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole point.
When you can sell a game, the real price of a new one isn't $70. It's $70 minus whatever you get back if you move it in the first few weeks or months. Timed right, that spread is enormous—I've come out close to 70% ahead on a game before it was a month old. It made the jump from $60 to $70, and soon to $80, sting a lot less, because the sticker price was never the number I actually paid.
Digital takes that away. Not the price—the lever. I can't sell a digital game, I can't trade it toward the next one, and I can't do the small bit of work that turned $70 into $21. And I don't think higher prices are unreasonable; development costs are genuinely high, and I don't expect digital-only to make games any cheaper. If anything, those costs will eat whatever savings might have reached me. So I'm not asking for a discount. I'm pointing out that the one tool I had to control my own cost is quietly going away.
I'm not anti-digital
I want to be fair, because this isn't a physical-media purity thing. I already buy digitally when the math says to. Sports games are the obvious case—they refresh every year and have basically no resale value by the time I'm done, so I never bother with a disc. And if something's discounted enough online, I'll take the discount. I go digital when digital is the better deal.
That's exactly why this bothers me. The choice is what's disappearing. Right now, I get to decide, game by game, whether resale value is worth keeping the disc. In 2028, that decision gets made for me.
Where this probably lands
Here's the ironic part, and it's the honest one: Sony may end up getting less of my money, not more. I'm older now, I have less time, and I already buy fewer games than I used to. A lot of what I play, I'm happy to wait on until it's on sale. Take away my ability to buy new, play, and sell back, and I don't suddenly start paying full price for everything—I buy less. The games I don't feel the need to play right away, I'll wait out even longer.
GTA 6 will be digital only, and it'll sell absurdly well regardless; for a game like that, distribution truly doesn't matter. But most games aren't GTA 6. Most games are the ones I was on the fence about—the ones the trade-in math nudged me into buying at launch instead of a year later. Those are the purchases that quietly go away.
Console gaming got a little more expensive again. Not because the number on the box went up, though it did, but because the number I actually paid is about to.