The eternal physical game: the great illusion

In gamers' minds, the physical copy is a guarantee of eternal access: the disc is at your place, nobody can take it from you. That comforting belief has been largely an illusion since the era of connected consoles. And it feeds a false debate: physical versus digital is not the real subject. The real subject is what you actually buy, in both cases.

In both cases, you buy the same thing: a licence

Whether the game arrives in a box or as a download, what you legally acquire is identical: a licence to use, governed by a contract nobody reads, revocable and modifiable by the publisher. The disc is not the game: it is a delivery medium, a piece of plastic carrying data and a right of use. You own the game neither physically nor digitally; in both cases you hold the same permission to play. The difference between the two formats was never the nature of the right, only the practical guarantees that came with it: resale, lending, independence from an online store.

The disc does not just contain the game

Beyond the data, a modern game relies on licence validation: an identifier the console checks. What happens if the licence policy changes, or if a system update decides that certain keys are no longer valid? The console can, technically, refuse to launch the game, even though the data is still on the disc, intact.

"Physical has been dead since 2005"

This is not a figure of speech. Ever since consoles became permanently connected, the PS3, the PSP, the Xbox 360, from the mid-2000s onward, a manufacturer has had the technical means to ban a game remotely, through firmware and its servers, including a game you own in a box. The medium carries a code; the system could decide never to run it again.

In other words, "they won't come and take it from my home" is true, and protects you from nothing: they do not need to come and take it. The disc will stay on your shelf, intact, and the console will refuse to launch it. This has never happened at scale for a legitimate game, but it has been possible for some twenty years, and contracts are starting to say it in black and white: in May 2025, Nintendo changed its EULA to allow itself to render a console "permanently unusable in whole or in part" in case of use it deems non-compliant. A telling detail: that clause does not fully apply in the European Union, where consumer law forbids it. Protection does not come from the plastic; it comes from the law.

"Semi-physical" games

The phenomenon gets worse with games whose disc contains only a fraction of the content: massive day-one updates, essential content to download, patches without which the game does not work. The medium becomes a mere entry ticket, and the day the servers close, it is often worth very little.

Losing the choice is still a problem, but not the one you think

Should we therefore shrug at PlayStation's announced end of the disc? No. Losing the choice of format is a real setback: the disc de facto provided a second-hand market, lending between friends, resilience against store closures. But the fight is not about saving a disappearing medium: it is about turning the rights that this medium guaranteed by accident into rights guaranteed by law, whatever the format. That is exactly what is at stake right now around the Digital Fairness Act.

So the question is not "physical or digital?", but "which rights, and which guarantees of duration, whatever the medium?"

Also read: Do you really own what you buy? · What is an EULA? · Physical, digital, Game Pass: what do you actually keep?

References

• Techdirt, Nintendo's May 2025 EULA update (the "permanently unusable" clause)
• NotebookCheck, the same clause and its limitation in the European Union