PlayStation owners have started a week-long boycott of Sony’s gaming platform, switching off their consoles to protest the company’s plan to move away from physical game discs.
The #PSBlackout campaign began on August 23 and will run through August 30. Supporters are being asked to stay away from PlayStation services during the protest, including avoiding game sessions, PlayStation Network activity and purchases.
The campaign comes after Sony announced that it plans to stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation games from January 2028. The decision has sparked anger among players who want to continue buying, collecting, reselling and sharing physical copies of games.
Rather than simply criticizing Sony online, organizers want users to demonstrate their opposition by temporarily abandoning the platform. The idea is that a noticeable fall in PlayStation activity and spending could put additional pressure on Sony to reconsider its strategy.
The boycott, however, is already facing criticism from within the gaming community. Some players argue that a protest with a fixed one-week end date is unlikely to have a meaningful financial impact on Sony. Others say refusing to buy games and PlayStation products for a longer period would send a stronger message.
The dispute has already spilled into PlayStation’s social-media channels. Recent game showcases and trailers have attracted large numbers of comments from players demanding physical releases, with the phrase “no disc, no buy” becoming a common protest message.
Sony’s shift does not mean existing PS5 discs will suddenly stop working. The planned change concerns new games released from January 2028 onward. Games released before that cutoff can continue to be played on compatible disc-drive consoles.
For now, the PSBlackout is largely a grassroots protest rather than an official PlayStation action. Whether enough owners participate to make Sony take notice remains unclear, but the growing backlash shows that the move away from physical games has become a major point of contention among PlayStation fans.
