Jul 16, 2026
If you own a PlayStation in the U.S., you’ve never had to wonder whether Sony’s online shop works where you live. You turn on the console, buy a game and play it.
But that isn’t most of the world’s experience.
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Sony’s own country selector (the closest thing the company publishes to a map of where PlayStation operates) comes to 73 countries and regions when you count it. Put that next to the usual 195 countries in the world — 193 United Nations member states plus two observers — and more than 60% of the world’s countries don’t have official access to Sony’s store.
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Estonia isn’t on the list. Neither is Latvia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt or Kenya. You can walk into a shop in any of them, buy a PlayStation 5, carry it home and discover Sony’s store won’t serve you.
There’s always been a way around that, and it’s been sitting on shelves the whole time: the disc. On July 1, Sony said it’s ending them for new games.
What Sony actually announced
Sony plans to stop making physical discs for all new PlayStation games in January 2028. The company says it’s following its players, and pointed to a preference for digital that “significantly outpaces” physical discs. Market tracker Circana found that U.S. spending on new physical games dropped 11% to about $1.5 billion in 2025, down from $11.6 billion in 2008.
In plain terms: after January 2028, every new PlayStation game can only be purchased via a download. You buy it from the online PlayStation Store and it lands in your account. Stores will still sell PlayStation games, but Sony says they’ll be “in digital formats only.” The company hasn’t said what that will look like on a shelf yet. Maybe it’s a download code in a box, a card, or something else, but for now it told developers the details aren’t final.
It doesn’t matter where you live if you use a disc to play a game: you buy it, you put it in, it works. A digital game, however, has to be in a PlayStation Network account, and that account has to be registered to a country Sony supports.
Workarounds exist, but they’re messy. Some players register their account to a neighboring country Sony does serve. On paper, Sony’s own rules make that a tight squeeze. The terms say your account info “must be accurate and complete,” and Sony reserves the right to suspend accounts created with false details.
Once you pick a country, you’re stuck with it. You can’t change it later. Your PlayStation wallet only takes prepaid cards from that same country. And if you try to pay with a regular card, Sony can check the card’s country against your account and turn the payment down if they don’t match.
One thing does soften the cliff. Sony has since told publishers they can keep ordering discs for games released before January 2028, first reported by industry newsletter Game File, so older titles don’t get cut off at the factory. What’s already out stays in print as long as it’s still worth pressing, and the catalog slowly ages from there.
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How to check whether Sony serves you
Sony never publishes a neat list of where it doesn’t operate. What it publishes is the country selector. If your country is on that page when you scroll through it, then you can buy digital games in your country. If your country isn’t on that list, there’s your answer.
Why this reaches Americans, too
Being on Sony’s list doesn’t protect you from the change. It just changes what it costs you.
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Andrew Ching, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School who studies used‑game demand, walked Fortune through it with a round number. A $60 game you can later trade in for about $20 effectively costs you $40. That resale value works like a rebate you collect later. Take it away, Ching said, and what buyers pay falls with it.
Real numbers back him up. As of July 16, GameStop was offering up to $24.50 in cash — or up to $35 in store credit — for a traded-in copy of the recent PS5 release 007: First Light. After January 2028, a new PlayStation game has no trade-in value at all, because there’s nothing to hand across the counter.
What this means for your money
Check Sony’s country selector before you buy a PS5 abroad. A console in Nairobi or Tallinn works today because discs work. In 2028, it turns into a machine that can’t buy new games.
If you live in a supported country, be honest about what your library is worth. The discs you own now may be the last PlayStation games you’ll be able to sell, lend or trade. Whatever GameStop offers you today is a number that drops to zero for everything you buy after the cutoff.
Buy discs for the games you actually plan to keep, but not for nostalgia. Sony’s own rules show why it matters. If Sony suspends your console or your account, you can lose access to your digital library, even for games you paid for, but disc games that don’t rely on its servers will still run.
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Godwin Oluponmile is a content specialist, SEO strategist and copywriter with seven years of expertise in finance, Web 3.0, B2B SaaS and technology. His work has been featured in publications such as Entrepreneur, HackerNoon, Blocktelegraph and Benzinga.
