Three hundred eighty-seven thousand signatures is a lot of people to annoy over a piece of plastic. That's roughly where the "Don't Kill the Disc" petition stood after Sony said it would stop making discs as of 2028. The anger is fresh. The idea isn't. According to one Call of Duty veteran, the push to cut discs is nearly two decades old, and it never came from players.

A boardroom idea from 2007

Robert Bowling was a creative strategist on the Call of Duty franchise at Infinity Ward from 2006 to 2012. He told Decrypt that he first heard talk of dropping discs in 2007, while the team was building Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. An Activision executive, he said, floated going fully digital. The logic was tidy: no discs, no resale conversation, and Activision would control the market for its own games.

There was a second benefit. Xbox and PlayStation charge a fee for putting a game on a disc, so a digital-only release would sidestep it.

Activision didn't immediately respond to Decrypt's request for comment. This is one person's account of internal talk from nineteen years ago, and it should be read that way. It's also a plausible account, because the incentives he describes haven't changed.

The GameStop problem

Bowling's backstory runs through the used-game market, meaning the resale of a game after its first owner is done with it. Publishers, he said, had been working quietly to get GameStop to share revenue from second-hand sales. GameStop won that fight. With negotiation off the table, cutting discs became a way to kill resale outright rather than bargain over it.

Here's the mechanism. A used copy of a disc-based game is the one sale a publisher can't touch, because the buyer owns the object and can hand it on. Every other route, from rental to trade-in, eventually runs through that same physical disc. Remove the disc and the secondary market has nothing to attach to. (Neat, if you're the publisher.)

Bowling says he objected at the time. As he tells it, his worry was that a modest profit bump would cost the industry something harder to price: the pleasure of building a shelf of games you actually own. He argued that this runs against the culture shared by players and developers alike.

Why Sony can do it now

If publishers wanted this in 2007, why did it take until 2028 to get a firm date? Bowling's answer is simple: habits flipped. More people now buy digital than physical, so abandoning discs costs less than it used to. The idea didn't get better. The audience just stopped resisting as hard.

That tracks with how platform shifts usually go. Nobody announces the end of a format while most customers still use it.

Sony has at least one prominent defender. PlayStation founder Ken Kutaragi sided with the company, saying that any gamer upset by the change has a mentality problem. That's a bold way to address 387,000 customers, and I doubt it calms anyone with a shelf of PS4 and PS5 boxes.

Ownership is the real fight

The disc is a proxy. What people are actually arguing about is whether a purchase is a purchase.

Per court filings cited in the Decrypt report, Sony's position is that a PlayStation Store purchase doesn't transfer ownership. It grants a license (permission to use the game, not title to it), and that license can be revoked at any time. Put that next to a world without discs and the petition makes more sense. A disc is a physical receipt. Take it away and the license terms are all that's left.

Bowling described a split inside the industry. One camp treats games as a software product. The other sees art, entertainment, collectibles, something closer to a way of life. Developers, he argued, build games so people can buy, share and treasure them, while publishers, Sony included, lean on the balance sheet and give little weight to what the games mean to the people playing.

He isn't a neutral voice, and his path is worth knowing. After Infinity Ward he did creative consulting at Electronic Arts, with credits that span a Battlefield entry, the hero shooter Apex Legends and a Star Wars action-adventure. In 2021 he co-founded Midnight Society, the studio behind the crypto extraction shooter Deadrop (a game where you drop in, grab loot and try to get out), and left in 2025 as funding ran dry. He now runs //18.bravo, which is working on a first-person shooter. So: a developer's view, from someone who has also lived through a blockchain-gaming ownership pitch that didn't find its money.

What to watch

Three things. First, whether Sony answers the petition with anything beyond the 2028 date, such as clearer terms on what happens to purchased libraries. Second, whether Microsoft and Nintendo get pressed on their own disc plans. Third, whether regulators or courts start treating license versus ownership as a consumer protection issue instead of a footnote in a filing.

Sony hasn't said the petition will change anything. Nothing in its court position suggests it should expect to lose the argument. But 387,000 people have now put their names next to a question the industry would rather leave in the fine print.