A Dutch lawsuit has alleged that Sony’s recent decision to halt production of physical PlayStation games will lead to a spike in the price of new titles.
At the start of July, Sony confirmed that from January 2028 onwards, they would cease physical disc production for all new titles.
As all physical PS5 discs – including those of third-party titles – are manufactured in-house by Sony, this change effectively marks the end of physical PlayStation gaming.
And while this has been widely criticised for being anti-consumer with regard to players no longer owning their games, players may be dealt a second blow when it comes to price.
Last week, Dutch consumer group Stichting Massaschade & Consument filed a $427 million lawsuit on behalf of 1.7m Dutch PlayStation users, claiming that when physical alternatives disappear, the price of digital PlayStation games could cause game prices to rise significantly.
Currently, the PlayStation Store takes a 30 per cent cut of all games sold digitally on the platform, dubbed a so-called ‘Sony tax’.
Conversely, studios currently selling physical PlayStation games pay Sony a lower, flat fee, making it cheaper overall for them to sell titles in this manner.
Thus, if forced to give Sony the full 30 per cent cut of all games sold on PlayStation consoles, the argument suggests that studios may be forced to raise their prices to make up the difference, transferring the cost onto consumers.
Via Fortune, Andrew Ching, marketing chair at Johns Hopkins Business School, explained that the end of physical PlayStation titles marks the beginning of an effective monopoly in which consumers are forced to buy higher-priced games directly from the PlayStation Store, with no possible alternatives.
This effectively compounds the impact on consumers, as it increases the price of new games while eliminating the option to purchase secondhand titles for a lower cost.
The move from Sony has been widely viewed as being caused by the speculative price of the upcoming PS6 console.
With the price inflation of components like RAM showing no signs of slowing, Sony is apparently unwilling to sell the console for more than $1000, for fear of pricing out consumers.
And while the move has been marketed from their end as a response to the majority of games being purchased digitally – around 85 per cent – many have speculated that Sony is actually looking to bring in more revenue from software sales in an attempt to offset the lost revenue caused by a cheaper PS6.
Regardless of the reasoning behind the decision, what appears clear is that Sony’s decision to end the production of physical games is an out-and-out negative for many players, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
