1. Sony's Disc Decision and Who Pays for It
Sony's decision to stop manufacturing physical discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028 is expected to weigh most heavily on low-income players, according to industry experts who spoke about the change on November 7. Cheap second-hand games, slow internet connections and restricted access to the PlayStation Network are the main pressure points, and they are sharpest across Africa.
The company has said that games released from January 2028 onward will be sold only in digital form, through the PlayStation Store and through retailers that sell digital codes. Titles launched before that date will continue to be produced and sold on discs, and existing discs will keep working. The change therefore does not touch the libraries players already own, but it reshapes how new games reach them.
The announcement fits a long trend in console gaming. Each hardware generation has leaned further on downloads, and publishers favor digital sales because they avoid manufacturing, shipping and retail margins while keeping control over pricing and promotions. For consumers, the trade-off is that a digital purchase is a license tied to an account rather than an object that can be sold on, which is why the end of discs matters beyond convenience.
Sony has described the shift as a natural direction as digital demand outpaces discs. The company has said that digital downloads accounted for roughly 80% of its full-game software sales in its 2025 fiscal year, with physical discs making up about 22% of unit sales in the figures it reported in May. For a large share of customers, then, the disc has already become the minority option. The experts quoted in this report argue that the remaining disc buyers are disproportionately people for whom the alternative is expensive or impractical.
2. Why Does the End of Discs Hurt Low-Income Gamers?
Physical discs support a resale economy that digital storefronts do not replicate. A disc can be traded in, lent to a friend or bought used at a discount, and for many households that used market has long been the most affordable way to build a collection. Digital sales on the PlayStation Store do include periodic discounts, but buying that way presumes a reliable, fast connection, which rural and low-income households are less likely to have.
Joost van Dreunen, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and an author on the video game business, said that removing discs also removes the retail channel and the discounted used market on which lower-income players depend. He argued that the effect is unlikely to appear in the financial results of the largest publishers, because those companies concentrate on premium offerings aimed at affluent buyers. In his framing, the industry is moving toward what he called a luxury class of gamers.
The concern about cost is not confined to software. Sony raised the price of the PlayStation 5 in March 2026, citing global economic pressures. The article also noted that Fortune has reportedly projected that the next Xbox could cost as much as $1,800. Against that backdrop, a spokesperson for Gamer's Voice, a United Kingdom advocacy group for players, said the disc cut would probably fall hardest on people with lower incomes, who already face rising prices for hardware.
3. Out of Reach for Most Africans
In Africa, the experts say, the problem begins before any download starts. Isa Muhammad, the founder of Bijetic, a games industry platform focused on Africa and the Middle East, said the PlayStation 5 is already beyond the means of most people on the continent. Even among those who can afford the console, he said, many rely on second-hand games to keep playing, so the loss of discs removes the one route that kept the hobby accessible.
A second obstacle is that the PlayStation Network is officially supported in only one African country, South Africa, according to the report. Most other countries on the continent are missing from Sony's official list of supported regions. Players there cannot simply create a local account and pay in local currency in the way a customer in the United States or the United Kingdom can.
Muhammad said the workaround is familiar to gamers across the region. A Nigerian who wants to buy games digitally must register an account in another country, typically the United States or the United Kingdom, and then pay with foreign gift cards or a dollar-denominated card. That arrangement works for buying games today, when discs remain an option, but it becomes the only option once new releases are digital-only.
4. How Much Does Bandwidth Add to the Price of a Game?
Bandwidth is now part of what a game costs, van Dreunen said, and the burden is uneven. Slow download speeds in rural, remote and low-income areas are a major barrier everywhere, not only in Africa. In the United States, roughly one in four rural households lacks a wired provider offering speeds of 100 megabits per second down and 20 up. At a connection of 10 megabits per second, a 50-gigabyte download takes about 11 hours.
The arithmetic explains why the experts focus on connectivity. A download measured in tens or hundreds of gigabytes consumes a large share of a monthly data allowance on capped or prepaid plans, and a failed or interrupted transfer can mean paying for the same data twice. Players with fast, unmetered fiber rarely think about these costs, but for others the data bill is a second price tag attached to every release.
Internet quality across Africa and the Middle East varies widely, from very fast services in Dubai to unreliable access in Iran, and in some countries the cost of access is high. Muhammad offered a concrete example from Nigeria. He said he recently paid 75,000 naira, about $55, for a 450-gigabyte broadband bundle, an amount that exceeds Nigeria's minimum monthly wage.
That price matters because of the size of modern releases. The expected pre-load for Grand Theft Auto VI is 212 gigabytes. According to the report, a Nigerian player would pay about $80 for the game itself, plus between $25 and more than $60 in data charges to download it. At Nigeria's median connection speed of 36.77 megabits per second, as measured by Ookla's Speedtest, the transfer would take nearly 13 hours.
5. Account Rules and the Risk of Losing a Library
The third problem is legal and practical rather than financial. Sony's terms of service require users to register in their country of residence, and the company can suspend accounts that were created with false information. Muhammad pointed out that every Nigerian or Egyptian using a United States or United Kingdom account is therefore breaking the rules from the first day.
A buyer in Nigeria would need a non-Nigerian PlayStation Network account, a download code valid for that account's country, and a means of paying for it in local currency. Each step adds friction and cost, and each depends on a system that Sony's rules do not formally allow.
That exposure becomes serious in a fully digital future. Muhammad said African players worry that if they ever need Sony's help, for example to recover a locked account, the company could refuse or ban them because the account breaks its terms. An account of that kind holds every game the player has bought. If it cannot be recovered, he said, the player may have to purchase Grand Theft Auto VI and every other title again on a new account.
The distinction between buying a game and licensing it is central here. A disc-based copy can be resold, lent or kept for years regardless of what happens to an online account. A digital library, by contrast, is only as secure as the account that holds it, and recovery usually depends on proving identity to the platform operator. When the account was opened under another country's details, that proof can be difficult to provide.
He added that a disc-free future would make that scenario the reality for every new PlayStation game across most of Africa. With discs, a physical copy is at least a durable asset the buyer controls. With digital-only releases, ownership depends on the continued good standing of an account the platform operator may not recognize as legitimate.
6. What Remains Unanswered
Several practical questions about the transition are still open. Sony has not detailed how retail digital codes will work under the new model, nor has it said whether replacement discs or trade-in options will be offered for games released before 2028. Commentators have also noted that ending new discs would curb resale and game lending, the two practices at the center of the experts' concerns.
Sony and PlayStation did not respond to a request for comment on the concerns raised by the experts. Without a response, it is unclear whether the company plans any measures for regions where its network is not officially supported, such as expanded regional access, local payment options or relaxed account rules.
The cutover date of January 2028 leaves about two years in which the company and its retail partners can adjust. Until Sony addresses payment methods, regional availability and account recovery, the experts' warning stands: a decision framed as a response to consumer preference for digital may leave behind the players for whom discs were the only affordable path into the PlayStation ecosystem.