The great PlayStation blackout – will kids actually have to leave their bedrooms this summer?
Name: PlayStation blackout. Age: Forthcoming. Appearance: Thousands of gamers, blinking nervously in the sunlight. This sounds serious. It’s as serious as things could possibly get
Name: PlayStation blackout. Age: Forthcoming. Appearance: Thousands of gamers, blinking nervously in the sunlight. This sounds serious. It’s as serious as things could possibly get. Gamers are going to boycott PlayStation next month. Why? For the most serious reason of all: to protest against Sony’s decision to stop producing physical copies of PlayStation games in 2028. Wait, you can still buy physical copies of PlayStation games? Yes, you can, online and in toy shops and quite often near the sock multipacks at the back of some Sports Direct branches. Well, who knew? Admittedly, fewer and fewer people. Most gamers buy their games digitally, to the extent that only seven PS5 games have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year.
So nobody cares. Not so fast. Lots of people care very deeply about this. If you buy a disc of the game, it belongs to you. You can sell it, lend it to your friends, or display the box as a memento. Whereas if you download it? Then the game is locked to your account, and Sony controls the pricing, and can even withdraw it completely if it likes. Even though you bought it? Yes. In September, for example, Sony will be deleting 551 movies and TV shows from the UK PlayStation store – including the John Wick franchise, Paddington and Terminator 2 – because its content licensing agreement with StudioCanal has expired.
If you bought any of these titles, they will simply vanish from your library. So nobody owns anything? This is the fear. And this is why people are finally doing something about it. The boycott. That’s right. It has been proposed that nobody should use their PlayStation during the last week of August. No playing, no buying, no logging in. Wait, August? They want us to do this during the summer holidays? Yes! This is all about hitting them where it hurts. What am I going to do with my kids if they can’t play games? Will I actually have to parent them? Stay strong, comrade. This is for the greater good.
Which is what again? Being able to physically hold a copy of John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando in our hands, like the old days. I’m not sure this will catch on. But it must! Being a console owner in 2026 is like being repeatedly mugged by a large multinational corporation. We need to do something to show that we still matter and stop them taking us for granted. Do say: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!” Don’t say: “Unless Sony puts Farming Simulator on a CD for me.”
The BriefWire