Physical Gaming Is Having a Very Bad Few Weeks
It has been a rough stretch for anyone who cares about physical game releases. In the space of just a couple of weeks, the gaming world has been hit with a series of announcements that collectively paint a pretty grim picture for disc-based gaming. GTA 6 — the most anticipated game in years — opened pre-orders with the news that its so-called physical edition contains no disc whatsoever, just a download code in a box. Sony followed that up with confirmation that it will stop producing physical game discs entirely from January 2028. Rumors surfaced that Microsoft’s next console, Project Helix, will be digital-only. And a report from The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that, contrary to some hopeful fan interpretation of a Rockstar support email, there are currently no plans for a GTA 6 disc version at all — not at launch, not months after.
Two retailers, Video Games Plus and Loot Box Gaming, have already announced they will refuse to stock GTA 6 if it ships without an actual disc. The community has been loud and angry. And now, a studio head has stepped into the conversation with a refreshingly honest breakdown of why all of this is a real problem — specifically for the smaller studios that do not have Rockstar’s ability to just absorb whatever the market throws at them.
What the Lords of the Fallen 2 CEO Actually Said
CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski took to Twitter to lay out his position in a thread that is worth reading carefully, because it goes well beyond just expressing frustration. He started bluntly: “GTA 6 shipping with no disc feels unfair to studios still backing physical — and it’s accelerating the shift.”
He did not frame this as pure outrage. Tyminski acknowledged the business reality directly — physical releases already deliver far less revenue per unit, come with longer lead times, and pile on costs that are genuinely hard to justify in an industry where a significant number of studios are already operating in the red. Physical sales are well under 20 percent of total units at this point, and that number has only been trending in one direction.
CI Games still plans to ship Lords of the Fallen 2 on disc when it launches in Q1 2027 — the game was delayed out of 2026 partly to avoid getting buried by GTA 6’s November release. But Tyminski is being candid that the business case for making that choice gets harder every time a major publisher makes a move like this one. Sony ending physical support from 2028 makes it worse, because as Tyminski warned, that announcement alone could push publishers to drop disc releases as early as 2027 — well before the official deadline.
The Numbers That Make This So Hard for Smaller Studios
This is the part of Tyminski’s thread that hit hardest, because he did not just speak in generalities — he put actual figures on the table. At a $69.99 retail price point, here is roughly what the money looks like for a physical game sale:
- Retail margin: 25–35% off the top
- Distributor cut: another 10–20%
- Physical production costs: approximately $10 per unit
- What the studio actually sees: around $26 per copy sold
Now compare that to a digital sale, where the highest margin scenario leaves a studio with roughly $49 per unit. That is nearly double. And as Tyminski points out, it only gets more punishing as prices drop — sales, price cuts, and secondhand reselling all eat further into that already-thin $26. Rockstar can absorb this because GTA 6 will sell in volumes that most studios will never come close to. A smaller publisher releasing an ambitious action-RPG does not have that luxury, and every percentage point of margin matters.
It is also worth noting what the code-in-box format does to retailers. When a physical release contains no disc, retailers lose one of their main advantages — the ability to resell used copies. GameStop’s entire business model has been creaking for years, and this kind of shift only accelerates the pressure. Tyminski flagged this too, warning that retailers’ incentive to carry game products at all changes dramatically when there is no disc-based software to sell. Fewer physical releases mean fewer reasons for game-focused shops to stock shelves, which means less shelf space for the studios that are still producing discs, which makes physical even harder to justify — it becomes a self-reinforcing spiral.
GTA 6 Is Not the First, But It Is the Loudest
It is worth being fair here and noting that GTA 6 is not the first major game to go digital-only. Hellblade 2 shipped without a physical release and has fans still waiting for a boutique publisher like Limited Run Games to step in and produce one. Alan Wake 2 launched digital-only, though fan demand was strong enough that Remedy and Epic eventually decided a physical run was worth doing. Those examples actually offer a sliver of hope — that fan pressure can move the needle, and that third-party physical publishers can sometimes fill the gap when major studios will not.
But GTA 6 is a different scale entirely. This is arguably the most commercially significant game release in years, and the decision to strip out the disc is sending a signal that the industry will read clearly. If Rockstar does not need a disc, the logic goes, why does anyone? That reasoning is flawed when applied to smaller studios — as Tyminski’s numbers show — but it is the reasoning that boardrooms will use.
What It Means for the Rest of Physical Gaming
Baldur’s Gate 3 developers weighed in recently after Sony’s announcement, saying that producing the physical edition of that game was eye-wateringly expensive — but it was still worth it because fans genuinely treasured it. That sentiment is real, and it represents something important: there is a community of players for whom owning a disc is not just nostalgia, it is a matter of principle. They want to actually own the thing they paid for, not hold a license that can be revoked if a storefront shuts down or an account gets banned.
The question is whether that community is large enough to sustain the economics. Right now, at under 20 percent of total game sales and falling, the honest answer is that it is getting harder every year for studios to make the numbers work — even when they want to. Tyminski’s statement is not a complaint from someone who hates digital gaming. It is a warning from someone running a business who can see exactly where the trajectory leads, and who is trying to keep releasing physical copies despite the math telling him not to.
Whether Limited Run Games, Special Reserve Games, or other boutique publishers can become a genuine safety net for physical media fans in a post-disc world remains one of the more interesting open questions in gaming right now. But the window for the traditional retail disc to remain a mainstream option is clearly getting narrower.
It has been a heavy news week for the gaming industry across the board — from Xbox’s historic restructure and studio sell-offs to the Xbox CEO’s ambitious claim of reaching a billion daily players. If you are a Nintendo player in Europe watching all of this unfold, the Switch 2 replaceable battery rollout news is at least something more consumer-friendly to hold onto amidst all the bad news.
