Two stories this week quietly announced the end of an era. Nintendo confirmed it will stop selling the original Switch in Europe, while Sony reportedly told publishers it will only produce physical discs for games released before 2028. Read together with Fast Company's broader autopsy of physical media, the picture is clear: the games industry is dismantling the last infrastructure of consumer ownership, and doing it incrementally enough that almost nobody is angry enough to stop it.
Planned Obsolescence as Business Model
The Nintendo and Sony moves are not unrelated to Nicolas Cevallos's essay on iPods as modern heirlooms, which argues that the objects we buy for forever reveal our values in ways that subscription-everything never can. The original Switch was exactly that kind of object: a device people modded, repaired, and passed to their kids. Its discontinuation in Europe, tied to a battery-replaceability regulation, is the regulatory system working as intended but the corporate response working as companies prefer. Sony's disc phaseout is less ambiguous. It is a deliberate conversion of ownership into access, timed to normalize the shift before consumers fully register what they are losing.
The Collector's Last Stand and What Follows
Physical media collectors are not just nostalgics. They are preservationists by default. Rhizome's ongoing work on archiving digital culture shows how aggressively platforms and hardware manufacturers erase the record when formats become unprofitable. When Sony stops pressing discs and Nintendo discontinues hardware, the games that only exist on those formats become culturally inaccessible within a generation. A 2023 paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science found that fewer than 13% of games released before 2010 are currently available through legitimate commercial channels. That number will only shrink. The physics are simple: no disc, no preservation. No preservation, no history.