This week, Sony held its Q3 earnings call where the company confirmed that it is “cautiously” moving forward with plans to stop producing physical versions of PlayStation games starting in 2028, CFO Lin Tao said (see Tao’s comments in this video from Kotaku’s Ethan Gach).
“When we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion. And we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.
Sony has been receiving near-daily backlash from gamers online; most of the backlash isn’t over the medium of discs itself but a perceived lack of ownership since most digital sales are “licenses,” not something you actually own. Data from Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlighted that in 2008 over 100 PlayStation games sold more than 100,000 copies. This year, only 7 reached that mark.
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Unfortunately, Sony made this announcement just as prices are skyrocketing for RAM and storage, forcing hikes on everything from phones to laptops and anything that requires memory thanks to AI-driven supply constraints.
With that in mind, I decided to take a look at how much memory you would need for the 37 first-party games released for the PlayStation 5 since it launched in 2020.
Here’s the full list of the games
- Astro Bot
- Astro’s Playroom
- Days Gone Remastered
- Death Stranding: Director’s Cut
- Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
- Demon’s Souls remake
- Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut
- Ghost of Yōtei
- God of War Ragnarök
- God of War: Sons of Sparta
- Gran Turismo 7
- Helldivers 2
- Horizon Forbidden West
- Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered
- Lego Horizon Adventures
- Lost Soul Aside
- Midnight Murder Club
- MLB The Show 21
- MLB The Show 22
- MLB The Show 23
- MLB The Show 24
- MLB The Show 25
- MLB The Show 26
- Nioh collection (Nioh 1 & 2 Remastered)
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
- Returnal
- Rise of the Ronin
- Sackboy: A Big Adventure
- Saros
- Spider-Man Remastered
- Spider-Man 2
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Stellar Blade
- The Last of Us Part 1 remake
- The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection
- Until Dawn remake
Using the listed download size from the PlayStation Store, I found that the 37 games totaled 2,989.1 GB, or about 2.99 TB.
The PS5 comes with 1TB of storage, which you can expand with an m.2 SSD or an external hard drive. To fit all of these games, plus whatever extra space is needed for the operating system and any patches you’re going to want, at a minimum, a 4TB hard drive.
At the time of writing, the officially licensed 4TB WD Black NVMe m.2 SSD that PlayStation recommends sells for $789.99 on Amazon. That is $400 more than the same hard drive cost a year ago, and about as much as the PS5 Pro.
The cheapest 4TB drive, possibly compatible with the PS5, that I could find is a refurbished Samsung 990 Pro for $419.99 from Best Buy.
Unfortunately, those prices aren’t likely to get better, as SK Hynix, one of the big three RAM manufacturers alongside Samsung and Micron, recently warned that 2027 will be even worse for RAM prices. And it’s unlikely to get better by 2028, when Sony will stop making and selling physical copies of PS5 games.
Between rising prices and fears over ownership, gamers are stuck in a rough spot for the next few years. And that doesn’t even account for the higher price they’ll likely have to pay for a PS6 to play games from the next console generation.
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