Hideo Kojima has commented on Sony's decision to stop releasing new physical PlayStation games from January 2028. The game designer, known for Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, admitted that he is sad to watch discs disappear, since he grew up with physical media and still actively buys Blu-ray and CD releases.
At the same time, Kojima sees the move away from discs as only the first stage of a much larger shift. In his view, digital games still remain on the user's device: the data is downloaded to a console or PC drive, so the player keeps at least some control over it. The real threat, he says, is cloud gaming and the streaming model, where the files stay on company servers.
Kojima compared this with Netflix and Amazon: the user pays for access and effectively “opens a tap” through which content flows to them. But they do not own the files themselves. If a company, server infrastructure, political conditions, or distribution rules change, access to favorite films and games can simply vanish. That, Kojima believes, is what makes the cloud future especially unsettling.
Notably, Kojima did not soften his position despite his long-standing ties with Sony. After he left Konami, Sony helped him launch Kojima Productions and gave him access to the Decima engine for Death Stranding. He is now working on the horror game OD with Xbox support, while also preparing Physint, a PlayStation exclusive inspired by Metal Gear.
Kojima's opinion is unlikely to stop Sony: the company is already changing its approach to physical media production. But his warning fits neatly into the wider debate about the future of content ownership. Losing discs is already painful for collectors, yet a full move to the cloud could be even more serious: in that scenario, players are left not with a copy, but only with temporary access rights.