As a reporter, it's important for me to watch PlayStation's ongoing PR nightmare from a purely objective perspective – that way I can tell you all what's happening with as little influence as possible from my own personal opinions. But for a company like Nintendo, who undoubtedly sees Sony as one of its foremost competitors, you presumably want to watch what's been happening in the wake of PlayStation's announcement that physical disc production is ending in 2028 with a much more strategic eye. Nintendo has always been extraordinarily rigid, deliberate, and disciplined in its messaging, and a former marketing lead says the company is strategically tweaking its public-facing stance on physical media in direct response to Sony's current predicament.
Within this very specific context, Nintendo is already in an advantageous PR position just from releasing a console in 2025 that fully supports physical games with no digital-only variant, while both current-gen PlayStation and Xbox console lineups include discless versions. Former Nintendo marketing lead Kit Ellis points this out in a new YouTube short where he analyzes the carefully constructed words of his old co-worker, Bill van Zyll, who's currently overseeing Nintendo's Latin America operations. Van Zyll recently said Nintendo has "no plans to abandon physical media" because "we know how much fans also enjoy it," and Ellis reckons this was part of Nintendo's strategy to capitalize on the whole PlayStation debacle.
"This is definitely not Bill firing from the hip," Ellis says. "This is the pre-approved Nintendo messaging that everybody who's doing an interview has drilled into them and they have to say it. First, this stands out to me as messaging that was clearly revised recently following all of Sony's issues in light of them moving away from physical games.
"Specifically, the point of them saying 'we know the fans like them' is something that, when you say it, you are positioning yourself as having a better solution than your competition."
Of course, it's worth pointing out that Nintendo's current approach to physical games isn't entirely without its controversy, as it includes game-key cards, which represent a sort-of physical/digital hybrid where you buy a physical game case but inside is a cartridge that simply prompts your Switch 2 to download a game key over the internet. In other words, the actual full game data isn't on the cartridge, which in some ways defeats the purpose of owning a physical game versus being granted a digital license to download it. Most physical Switch 2 games are still being shipped in traditional game cartridges, but they're becoming more common in big, AAA releases like Assassin's Creed Shadows, 007: First Light, and Borderlands 4.
