This week, Sony proudly unveiled its new LX3 turntable, inviting music fans to "rediscover the warmth, detail, and ritual of vinyl" and enjoy music "the way it was meant to be heard."
Warmth. Detail. Ritual. Sony understands perfectly well why physical media matters. The feeling of holding an album in your hands, dropping the needle, owning something real. They're building an entire marketing campaign around it.
And yet this is the very same Sony that is ending PlayStation game disc manufacturing in January 2028.
So physical media is precious and worth celebrating — when it's vinyl and Sony profits from selling turntables. But when it's our games, we're told discs are obsolete and downloads are the future. The message couldn't be clearer: physical ownership matters, just not for gamers.
The community saw right through it. Sony's turntable post was immediately flooded with replies calling out the hypocrisy — and they deserve every single one.
And as salt to the injury: GTA 6
The same week, we got a preview of the "future" Sony is pushing us toward. GTA 6's boxed release contains no disc — just a download code. And Rockstar's own support page reveals that in Japan, those codes expire 170 days after issuance, citing "regional regulations." That puts the cutoff around May 8, 2027 — buy an unopened box after that date, and your code may simply not work. The code must also be redeemed on a Japan-registered PlayStation account, and Rockstar hasn't even clarified whether the expiry applies to the full game or just preorder DLC.
Think about that. A "physical" copy of the biggest game of the decade — with an expiration date.
A vinyl record from 1970 still plays today. A game disc from 1995 still plays today. A GTA 6 code bought in Japan might be dead paper by mid-2027.
That is the difference between owning and renting. That is what we're fighting for.
Share this. Talk about it. The contrast has never been this obvious — Sony made our argument for us.
Source:
Sony's Vinyl Hypocrisy
Japanese GTA 6 expire after 170 days