Now that Sony's revealed it's discontinuing physical games in 2028, the big questions are: when is the PS6 going to arrive, and will it allow you to play discs at all? One analyst believes we might be waiting a while for the new system, and doesn't expect Sony to emphasize discs in the standard version of its new-gen console.
Piers Harding-Rolls, senior games research analyst at Ampere Analysis, shared his thoughts with Game File. "This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest," he says of the PlayStation's physical news, adding that "the base version of a PS6 will not include a physical media drive."
He primarily points towards Sony's desire to manufacture consoles as cheaply as possible as the motivating factor, and that definitely tracks. Just recently, PlayStation leadership affirmed they do not plan to sell hardware at a loss. The entire hardware pipeline has only become more expensive in recent years, and it doesn't seem like those costs are going to come down any time soon.
Hard as it may be to believe, we are coming up to the time in the PS5's lifecycle where the prospect of the PS6 is looming. The PlayStation 5 arrived just under six years ago, and it'll be seven years old when 2028 starts. Seven years separated both the PS5 and PS4 from their predecessors.
However, the landscape has shifted in that time, and not only is sourcing hardware components harder than before, I'd also argue that the general need and appetite for upgraded systems is lower. GTA 6 comfortably launching on the current console generation certainly seems to indicate we won't be seeing PS5 pushed to its absolute limits for a while.
Harding-Rolls is likely correct that a disc drive may be an optional luxury, at best, for the next PlayStation console. PS5 disc backwards compatibility is a factor, but Sony presumably wouldn't discontinue physical games without plans to phase out support for the format altogether, and it also probably wouldn't want to rush out a console right before the end of physical games hits. And we're already starting to see major games push toward digital-only as a means of distribution - GTA 6 won't have physical copies at launch, for one, and Rockstar hasn't confirmed that it's ever getting any.
