Sony’s decision to end physical disc manufacturing for PlayStation by 2028 has triggered something the company probably did not anticipate: a serious reconsideration among its most engaged fans, and those fans are looking at PC.
A Push Square community poll drawing more than 6,500 votes found that 45% of respondents are “seriously considering” a move to PC gaming. Just 23% said they would stick with PlayStation. A further 7% admitted they have thought about switching but do not expect to go through with it, while 15% said they have already made the transition and 10% reported they already play on both platforms.
The poll was fielded in direct response to Sony’s July 1 announcement that all new PlayStation titles would shift to digital-only distribution starting in January 2028. Games released before that cutoff will remain available on disc, but anything going forward will live exclusively on the PlayStation Store. Only 14% of respondents said they would buy a $1,000 PS6 at launch, a data point that should land harder at 1 Infinite Loop than any press release Sony puts out.
Push Square’s readership skews heavily toward die-hard PlayStation fans, which makes 45% of those people seriously entertaining the exit door a remarkable number. This is not a sample of casual players weighing in: these are the people who own every console, pre-order collectors’ editions, and evangelize PlayStation to their friends. If even a fraction of them follow through, Steam’s numbers are going to reflect it.
Those who are considering the move have good reasons as they have been spelled out on every gaming forum for the past two weeks. Physical ownership is gone. Used game sales evaporate. Game prices on the PC platform are historically lower, sales are deeper, and mods extend the lifespan of every title. Free online play on PC remains a persistent argument that Sony has never successfully countered. The one objection that rings true is cost: a comparable PC build in July 2026 is not cheap given the current RAM shortage, and a $1,000 PS6 might look value-competitive to first-time builders once they price out DDR5 kits.
PC’s master race stands to absorb a cohort of new entrants who are already socialized into paying for online services and who have been trained, in some cases for decades, to value a library of games they actually own. Whether GPU vendors and platform storefronts capitalize on that window is a separate question, but the push coming from Sony’s side of the equation is as strong as it has ever been.
We covered the 250,000-signature petition to save physical games and Sony’s quiet removal of PC port language from its documentation earlier. This poll data is the first quantitative picture of exactly how hard that decision hit the core fanbase.
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