Ubisoft CEO Says PlayStation Ditching Discs Won’t “Disturb” the Industry — But Not Everyone Agrees

The PlayStation physical disc debate is not going away any time soon, and now one of the biggest publishers in the industry has thrown their hat into the ring. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has weighed in on Sony’s plan to stop producing physical game discs starting January 2028 — and his take? Basically, relax, it’ll be fine. The gaming world, predictably, is not entirely convinced.

What Guillemot Actually Said

The comments came during Ubisoft’s latest financial earnings call, the same one that confirmed Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced has already shifted over 3.5 million copies. An analyst on the call asked Guillemot directly whether Sony’s decision created any concerns — specifically whether losing the used games market (where players sell old games to fund new purchases) could create a meaningful hit to demand.

Guillemot’s response was measured but clear. He pointed to the PC market as his main reference point, arguing that going fully digital actually helped grow the platform rather than damage it. He also flagged the potential upside for hardware costs — remove a disc drive from a console, and theoretically you can bring the launch price down. Then came his headline quote: there are “pluses and minuses,” but Ubisoft doesn’t think it will “disturb, too much, the industry.”

From a pure publisher perspective, it’s not a surprising stance. Ubisoft, like most major publishers, makes the overwhelming majority of its revenue from digital sales. Capcom reported that 93 percent of its game sales were digital in the past year alone, and Sony’s own financial data shows physical now represents a small sliver of total software revenue. The trajectory has been pointing this way for a long time, and for big publishers it changes very little about how they actually do business.

PlayStation Store

The PC Comparison — Is It Actually Fair?

The PC parallel is the cornerstone of Guillemot’s argument, and it has real merit — but it also has real limits that are worth unpacking. Yes, PC gaming went essentially all-digital years ago and the market didn’t collapse. Steam became one of the most successful platforms in gaming history, and the PC gaming audience has grown consistently. Guillemot isn’t wrong about that trajectory.

But here’s the key difference that often gets glossed over in these conversations: PC is an open platform with multiple competing storefronts. Steam, Epic Games Store, GOG, Humble, and others all compete for your money, which creates some degree of market pressure on pricing and ownership conditions. On PlayStation, if you’re buying digital, there is exactly one place to do it — the PlayStation Store. Sony controls the entire digital ecosystem for its own hardware. That’s a meaningfully different situation to a PC user who can shop around.

The used games point raised during the call is also worth taking seriously. For plenty of players — especially those who aren’t in the higher income brackets — the ability to buy a game secondhand, finish it, sell it, and use that money toward the next purchase is a genuine part of how they budget for gaming. Digital games can’t be resold. You can’t trade them in, lend them to a friend, or pass them down. That’s not a minor inconvenience for everyone; for some players it fundamentally changes what they can afford to play.

The Hardware Cost Argument — Valid, But Complicated

Guillemot’s point about console prices is probably the strongest element of his argument, and it’s one that multiple industry figures have agreed with. Console hardware is getting genuinely expensive. The next PlayStation generation is already shaping up to be a costly one, and if removing a disc drive helps shave a meaningful chunk off the launch price, that’s a real benefit for players who are already stretched thin by the cost of living.

The counterargument, though, is that a discless console needs to compensate with more built-in storage. Games are only getting bigger, digital libraries take up serious space, and storage components aren’t cheap. You might lower the price in one area while raising it in another — it’s not a clean saving that flows entirely to the consumer. Exactly how that math shakes out will depend on what Sony actually charges for the PS6 and what storage configuration it ships with as standard.

The numbers on physical sales decline do lend weight to the general direction of travel. According to industry data, physical game sales in the US have fallen from around 292 million units in the 12-month period ending June 2009 to just 37 million units in the equivalent period ending June 2026. That’s a staggering collapse over 17 years. Guillemot is reading those numbers correctly when he says the market has been moving this way regardless of Sony’s announcement.

The Industry Isn’t Speaking With One Voice

What makes Guillemot’s “no big deal” framing interesting is how sharply it contrasts with other prominent voices in the gaming world. This is far from a settled consensus — and some of the people pushing back are among the most respected figures in the medium.

Hideo Kojima, speaking at Italy’s Il Cinema in Piazza film festival, described the news as “really sad” and went further than most critics to flag a broader concern: that what’s happening to games in 2028 could eventually happen to movies too. His worry isn’t just about discs — it’s about the streaming model that could follow, where you never truly own the content you pay for, but only hold “the right to turn the tap.” If a server goes down, if a service shuts, if a publisher pulls a title — your access disappears. That’s a legitimate concern that goes well beyond nostalgia for physical media.

Disgaea creator Sohei Niikawa took a more blunt approach, essentially arguing that if Sony is going fully digital, they might as well drop the dedicated hardware entirely. Larian Studios publishing director Michael Douse called the situation “heartbreaking.” A petition titled “Don’t Kill The Disc” has already gathered over 165,000 signatures from players who feel strongly that ownership of physical media is something worth protecting.

The divide here isn’t really between people who like discs and people who don’t. It’s between those who are primarily thinking about business metrics and market trajectories — where Guillemot sits — and those who are thinking about ownership, preservation, access, and the long-term health of gaming as a medium. Both sets of concerns are legitimate. They just don’t point to the same conclusion.

What This Means for the All-Digital Future

Sony’s announcement also carries implications that stretch beyond the immediate question of whether you can buy a game on a disc. Game preservation is already a serious and underappreciated problem in the industry — titles routinely become unavailable as storefronts close, licenses expire, or servers shut down. Physical copies are one of the key ways that old games survive. Once physical production ends, that safety net shrinks considerably for anything releasing after January 2028.

The timing of all this is also not lost on observers. Sony is planning a full visual rebrand of the PlayStation Network name by September 2026, has raised PlayStation Plus prices in recent months, and is now dealing with a major PSN outage today that locked thousands of players out of both online games and digital titles they already own. That last point is the most uncomfortable one for the pro-digital argument — when the network goes down, even your downloaded library becomes inaccessible. A disc sitting on your shelf doesn’t have that problem.

For players deciding how to think about all this, the honest answer is that Guillemot is probably right that the industry won’t be dramatically disrupted — publishers will adapt, digital revenue will continue to grow, and the business will move on. But “won’t disturb the industry” and “is good for players” are two very different claims, and only one of them is being made here. The games industry is going through enormous upheaval right now in terms of who holds power, who benefits, and what players actually own — if you want broader context on the scale of the shifts happening right now, the Saudi PIF’s acquisition of EA is another piece of the same puzzle.

Where Things Stand

Guillemot has added his voice to the “this is manageable” camp, and from a pure financial and market-data standpoint, his read is defensible. The trajectory toward digital has been unstoppable for years, and Sony’s 2028 deadline is arguably just a formal acknowledgement of what was already happening organically.

But the passion of the backlash — from players, from creators like Kojima, from preservationists and physical collectors — isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a genuine concern about what it means to truly own the media you pay for, and what happens to gaming history when the physical option disappears entirely. That debate isn’t going anywhere before 2028, and probably won’t settle even after.

In the meantime, if you’re a collector, now might be the time to start paying attention to which titles you want to own on disc while that’s still an option. And if you’re curious what else is shaping the future of gaming right now, there’s plenty happening — from the Kingdom Come Salvation trademark leak hinting at Warhorse’s next RPG to Guild Wars 3’s early lore drops suggesting a genuinely exciting magic system. The industry keeps moving, discs or not.