Hideo Kojima is not treating the decline of physical games as a neat bit of technological housekeeping. For the creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, the shift away from discs raises a more personal question: what do people actually own when the entertainment sits on a server they don’t control?
His comments follow a week of uneasy news for PlayStation users. Earlier this week, PlayStation announced that it would stop producing physical game discs in 2028. The company has also said it will continue supporting existing physical games after that point, but the production cutoff makes the direction of the platform pretty clear. It’s not exactly subtle.
Why Kojima is worried about digital ownership
Speaking at the Il Cinema in Piazza Film Festival in Italy, Kojima said the move away from physical media makes him sad because he grew up with formats people could hold, keep, lend, and preserve. He said he has been buying Blu-rays and CDs lately, partly because they still represent a kind of personal archive.
Games, he noted, are in a slightly different position right now. When players download a game to a hard drive, the data sits on their own device. That does not make the system perfect, since licenses, accounts, and platform rules still matter, but it is not the same as pure streaming.
Kojima’s larger concern is what happens if games move fully toward streaming, where access depends on remote servers and continuing corporate permission. In that model, a player may pay every month but never hold the underlying data. The collection starts to feel less like a shelf and more like a switch someone else controls.
The PlayStation movie removals sharpened the concern
The timing matters. PlayStation’s disc announcement came only days after more than 500 movies were removed from the PlayStation Store and from the libraries of users who had already bought them. That happened after an agreement with Studio Canal expired.
For anyone already uneasy about digital purchases, that was hardly reassuring. The movies were not simply unavailable for new buyers. They disappeared from customers who previously paid for them, which is the part that turns a policy update into an existential headache.
That incident helped frame Kojima’s warning. The worry is not just that physical media is disappearing. It is that licensing agreements, political changes, company priorities, or regional decisions could determine whether people can still access games and films years from now.
What Kojima said about a streaming-only future
Kojima described the risk directly in remarks translated by Genki:
Since production is ending in 2028, this is about video games, but I grew up with physical media, so I find it really sad. Currently, I’ve been buying up a lot of Blu-rays, such as various movies, and CDs too.
The situation is different for games, as they are downloaded to the hard drive, that means the game data remains on your own hardware. However, if things shift to streaming in the future, that won’t be the case anymore.
With streaming subscription services, like Netflix or Amazon, there is a server somewhere, and you essentially just have the right to turn the tap, and when you do, the data flows out. That’s how movies work on these platforms, right? You don’t download the data, you access it directly through a subscription. And the consequence of that is that you don’t actually possess the data yourself.
There are companies that own these servers and let you ‘turn the tap’ for a monthly fee. However, with nations, politics and various ways of thinking, one naturally has to consider the possibility that if there is a change, the data inside will stop being distributed. And if that happens you won’t be able to watch or play the movies and games you like.
That’s the scary part.
What’s happening to video games in 2028 could also happen to movies. That’s worth keeping in mind.
Why this lands beyond one console generation
Kojima’s point is not nostalgia for plastic boxes for its own sake. It is about cultural access. Games and films are not only products people consume once and forget. They are personal history, creative work, and, in many cases, part of how audiences understand an era.
A disc can be damaged, lost, or made useless by hardware failure. Physical media has never been magical. But it gives owners a level of independence from storefront decisions and subscription catalogs. Digital libraries, by contrast, often depend on terms that can change after money has already changed hands.
That is why the 2028 PlayStation decision has attracted so much attention. It suggests a future where physical releases become rarer, preservation becomes harder, and players have to trust platform holders more than ever. Trust is useful. But it still isn’t ownership.
Kojima wants audiences to notice the difference before the industry redraws the lines for them.
