A new market analysis is putting a hard number on what Sony's disc decision could cost the used games ecosystem, and it's certainly not small change. Dataintelo pegs the global second-hand game platform market, which covers pre-owned games, consoles, accessories, and peripherals, at $7.2 billion in 2025, with a projected climb to $13.8 billion by 2034 at a 7.5% annual growth rate.
That forecast was published before Sony's July 1 announcement that it will stop producing physical PlayStation game discs starting January 2028, so the real trajectory for used games specifically looks a lot less rosy than the raw numbers suggest. While the used game platform market itself is expected to grow, the pre-owned games segment is expected to shrink significantly.
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Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC that roughly a third of games have historically sold used, and trade-ins gave gamers actual cash toward buying something new. He didn't mince words on where physical retail is headed, calling brick-and-mortar game stores "doomed."
Morningstar's Kazunori Ito expects the resale market to keep shrinking and eventually disappear once new PlayStation titles stop showing up on disc. Games industry consultant Michael Futter called the move anti-consumer with no real justification behind it.
A used disc can be resold, lent to a friend, or traded in for credit toward the next release. A digital license can't do any of that, since it's tied to an account rather than a physical object you actually own. Sony already sold 70 million discs in fiscal 2025, roughly 22% of total game sales, so this isn't some niche behavior quietly fading out on its own. It's a meaningful chunk of how people buy and share games, especially in regions where a discounted used copy is the difference between playing a game or skipping it entirely.
Existing PS4 and PS5 discs aren't affected by the cutoff, so older libraries can keep circulating through eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or local shops. New titles releasing after January 2028 are a different story, with no resale path once digital-only becomes the default. GameStop's CEO has already said the decision is irrelevant to the company's operations since it moved away from relying on used software sales a while back, which tells you a lot about where that market has already been heading.
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Sony is also facing pushback beyond market analysts, including a nearly $500 million lawsuit in the Netherlands and a petition that passed 120,000 signatures within days of launching. None of that has changed the January 2028 date so far, and Sony hasn't outlined any replacement for the resale value discs used to provide.
