I bought a PS5 a couple of years ago and I have barely looked at a disc since. Digital was just easier. No case to lose, no drive whirring away like a small aircraft, no trip into town to a shop that may or may not still be there. Sure, I was losing the value of trade in, but I was ok with that. Then I built my own PC, Steam opened up in front of me, and I found the one feature that has quietly ruined every other games shop for me. If I buy something and it turns out to be a dud, I get my money back. No quibbles.
That habit suddenly matters a lot more, because Sony has just confirmed it is killing off physical PlayStation discs. So the question I have been chewing on is a simple one. Now that both PlayStation and PC are heading fully digital, how much more attractive is Steam as a result? The short version is a lot more attractive, and not for the reason the headlines are shouting about.
What Sony actually announced
From January 2028, no new PlayStation game will ship on a disc. That is the whole announcement in one line. Anything released before that date is safe, so your shelf of PS5 games is not about to stop working, and the disc drive in your console keeps spinning the games you already own. After the cut-off, every new release arrives as a download, either straight from the PlayStation Store or as a code in a box picked up at a retailer. Sony framed it as a natural response to how people already buy, and honestly the numbers back that up. On its own figures, digital made up 85% of full-game sales across PS4 and PS5, with physical clinging on at just 15%.
This did not come out of nowhere. The PS5 Pro shipped without a disc drive at all, GTA 6’s so-called physical edition in Ireland is a download code rattling around inside a box (a decision that has already caused quite a stir for prospective buyers), and now the discs themselves are being switched off. Read Sony’s own wording in the official PlayStation announcement confirming the end of new game discs and it is fairly clear the next console, whatever the PS6 turns out to be, is being built for a world with no drive in it.
Why discs were never really my problem
Here is where I have to be honest. I am exactly the buyer Sony is describing. I do not trade games into CeX when I am finished, I do not lend them to a mate, and I have not held a boxed game in about three years. With one exception — my Switch 2. For someone like me, the disc decision changes almost nothing on paper. If you are a collector, or you rely on the second-hand market to knock a few euro off the true cost of a game, that is a genuine loss and I understand the anger. Trading in or reselling a dud was always the physical buyer’s own version of a safety net, a way to claw back some value on a game that missed. That just is not the loss I feel.
What the decision does do, quietly, is remove the last structural reason a digital-first buyer had to pick PlayStation over PC. Discs were the one thing consoles offered that Steam could not, and take them away and you are left comparing two digital shops on their merits. Game libraries still count for something here too. Some Sony first-party exclusives eventually land on PC, but usually years later, while a genuine PS5 exclusive never touches Steam at all, so that factor cuts both ways depending on what you actually want to play. But once you set exclusives aside and just look at how each platform treats every other purchase, the comparison stops being close, and it comes down to one word.
The two hour rule that changed how I buy games
Refunds. On Steam, if you have played a game for under two hours and you bought it within the last fourteen days, you can hand it back and get your money returned. You do not need a reason. You do not have to prove it is broken. You can simply decide it is not your vibe and walk away. The first time I did it I genuinely did not believe it had worked until the notification landed. You can read the exact terms on Valve’s Steam refund policy page, and the two hour, fourteen day window has quietly become the standard everyone else is measured against.
This matters far more than it sounds. A new game in Ireland is knocking on €80, and €80 is a lot to gamble on a trailer and a few reviews. The refund window turns that gamble into a try. I have bought games on a whim, played them for forty minutes, realised they ran badly or just were not for me, and gotten every cent back. That safety net is the single reason I now buy first and ask questions later on Steam, when on any other platform I would agonise for a week and probably not bother.
What happens when you try to refund a PlayStation game
You mostly cannot. That is the blunt answer. PlayStation gives you fourteen days to change your mind, but only if you have not started downloading or streaming the game. The moment it begins landing on your console, the refund door shuts, unless the game is genuinely faulty. So the thing you actually want to do, play a game for an hour to see if it clicks and then hand it back, is the one thing you are not allowed to do.
On Steam you can play a game and still get a refund. On PlayStation, downloading it is the moment you lose the right to one. Same €80, wildly different level of risk.
So how much more attractive is Steam now?
For some, considerably more, but the discs are almost a red herring. Killing physical media is the symbol, not the substance. The substance is that when two shops are both selling you the same digital download, the one that lets you undo a bad decision is the better shop. Every time. Sony has spent this week telling its customers that the box and the disc no longer matter, which is fine, except it has nothing to put in that gap. Steam already filled it years ago.
There is a longer game here as well, and it is about permanence. A Steam or GOG library tends to follow you from one machine to the next, and some titles are DRM-free, which means they can outlive the shop that sold them. A PlayStation library lives and dies inside PlayStation. If you want proof of how that ends, look at the fact that Sony is also closing the PS3 and PS Vita stores and even recently 551 movies customers had “purchased”. Games that were only ever sold digitally on those platforms are effectively vanishing. That is the quiet risk of going all-in on a closed console shop, and it is the risk Steam is far better insulated against.
The Goosed verdict
Steam has quietly become the default home for anyone who buys their games digitally, and Sony’s disc decision only makes that clearer. I want to stress that I am not upset about the discs themselves, because I stopped using them the day I unboxed the console. What gets me is that Sony has now removed my last excuse to stay, and offered me nothing to match the one feature that keeps me on PC. The freedom to try an €80 game (a price point that makes the GTA VI pre-order questions everyone’s been asking feel a lot more urgent) and get my money back if it is rubbish is worth more to me than any disc ever was.
If you are a digital buyer weighing up where your next few hundred euro of games should live, Steam is the easy answer, and it has been for a while. If you still care about owning something physical on PlayStation, the timeline is now fixed. New PlayStation discs stop in January 2028, everything you already own is safe, and the shelf you have is the last shelf you are getting.
If you want phyiscal media, it appears the Switch 2 just got a little more appealing for now at least.
