As community outrage regarding Sony’s decision to stop making physical PlayStation game discs reaches an all-time high, the European Union has just confirmed that it’s unable to force the company’s hand.
As per an Irish Mirror report, gamers hoping that the European Union might intervene in Sony’s decision to stop making physical PlayStation game discs have been given a clear answer: it’s not going to happen.
EU Commissioner Michael McGrath, European Commissioner for consumer protection, addressed the issue directly with reporters in Strasbourg this week.
His message was blunt. Companies have the right to sell their products however they choose, as long as they don’t break existing consumer protection laws.
“It does come down to commercial and contractual freedoms, and companies are free to offer games and services in the manner that they see fit, provided that consumer rights are fully protected in line with national and EU law,” McGrath said. “At this time, we did have to consider a European citizens initiative on this question of whether games should continue to be available after a new edition of the game has been brought forward.”
For the uninitiated, Sony announced last week that it will stop manufacturing new physical game discs starting in January 2028. As you can expect, the move sparked widespread backlash from casual gamers and preservationists alike, many of whom called for regulators to step in.
At the time of writing, a petition on Change.org urging Sony to reverse its decision has reached nearly 300,000 signatures, with the number climbing steadily since it was launched.
Unfortunately, McGrath made clear that stopping production of a physical good isn’t the same as pulling access to something customers already own. In the EU’s view, that puts the decision well within Sony’s commercial freedom.
This isn’t the first time EU regulators have let gamers down. Last month, the Commission also rejected the Stop Killing Games campaign, which had gathered over 1.29 million signatures demanding publishers keep discontinued games playable.
The only silver lining given the situation is that games that are already released on disc aren’t getting discontinued. Sony has confirmed that publishers will still be able to produce physical copies of titles released in 2027 or earlier, even after the January 2028 cutoff.
