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GameStop chairman and CEO Ryan Cohen shrugged off the death of physical PlayStation discs and told Bloomberg the shift to digital “doesn’t matter at all” to his company.
This comes after Sony confirmed at the start of July that it will stop producing discs for all new PlayStation games from January 2028, which is one of the biggest moves toward digital-only gaming yet. The backlash was immediate, and players who still want to own their games rather than rent a license have spent weeks pushing back.
So when the boss of the biggest name in physical game retail finally weighed in, plenty expected him to share the worry. Instead, he could not have sounded less bothered.
Why GameStop boss isn’t sweating the disc apocalypse
When Cohen spoke on Bloomberg Tech, he dismissed the impact of Sony’s decision and he called the whole shift “totally, totally irrelevant” to GameStop.
He argued that physical game sales now make up only a small part of the business, then pointed to where the money actually comes from these days, since collectibles like trading cards and Pokemon products have grown into the company’s biggest earner while game software keeps shrinking.
(Conversation starts at around 42:00 mark)
None of this came out of nowhere, as earlier this year GameStop reported that collectibles made up 29% of first-quarter sales, outselling video game software, which is why Cohen has openly framed trading cards as a natural extension of the store’s buy-sell-trade roots.
On top of that, he is chasing a far bigger prize, as he set his sights beyond retail entirely with an unsolicited $56 billion bid to buy eBay that the e-commerce firm rejected as neither credible nor attractive.
Petition to keep discs on PlayStation gets hundreds of thousands of signatures
Hideo Kojima warns of “frightening” digital future as PlayStation ends disc production
Even so, Cohen’s shrug lands very differently from the rest of the industry, whether that’s the hundreds of thousands who signed a petition begging Sony to keep the disc alive or Hideo Kojima warning of a “frightening” digital-only future.
