Sony says the disc backlash isn’t making “any impact” on its business, and I believe it. Not because Sony is on a crusade. Because Sony is reading a number that says exactly that, and the number is correct.

Chet Faliszek — former Valve writer for Left 4 Dead, Portal — put it bluntly in a video: “You, the consumer, have made a choice, and your choice is for digital.” He’s right. Physical was 15% of full-game software sales on PS4 and PS5 in 4Q of fiscal year 2025. I’m in the other 85%. I stopped buying discs somewhere around the PS4 era and never went back, and I didn’t agonize about it. It was just practical. I ran out of shelf space for all the discs a long time ago.

So, the petition. 330,000 signatures sounds like a movement until you ask what a signature is. Signing takes an email address. It doesn’t check whether you own a PlayStation, or whether you’ve bought a game on one, or a disc in the last five years. Signing costs nothing, which is the whole point of signing. Sony has actual purchase records. Weighed against those, a signature is a sentiment, and sentiment has never once appeared in a quarterly.

Faliszek gets to the rest of it before I do. He argues the petition should be aiming at accountability rather than reversal. He also points out that none of this is new information, that people have known the terms for twenty-odd years and kept buying digital anyway. That’s why neither version of the complaint lands. “I bought it and now it’s unplayable” — discs did that constantly. Rot, dead optical drives, dead consoles, online passes, day-one patches on servers long since switched off. The emulation scene isn’t a hobby, it’s a salvage operation, and it exists because physical failed people first. “I bought it and I want the control a disc gave me” — that’s the license, and it has been the license the entire time.

The one thing I’ll grant is that the storefronts have been slippery about the word. A button labelled BUY sitting on top of an agreement that says LICENSE is an ambiguity that has gone uncorrected for two decades. But ambiguity isn’t concealment. Anyone who wanted to know could know, and most of us flagrantly knew it too. Who didn’t know you couldn’t give away or sell games on your Steam account?

Which is what makes the petition reactionary rather than useful. Steam has never sold a disc. Not one, ever. Valve is now putting hardware in living rooms, and nobody is circulating a petition demanding Steam ship physical copies, because the idea is absurd on its face. Sony is being shouted at for arriving, in 2028, at the address the largest PC storefront has occupied since 2003.

The argument worth having isn’t about discs. It’s about what you own after the purchase, and nobody wants to have it, because that argument doesn’t have a clear answer.