Sony recently announced that the PlayStation console will go fully digital in 2028, which immediately caused an uproar among players and industry insiders. In addition to impacting the second-hand market and subsequent preservation, many players are also worried that this is likely to have an unprecedented major impact on physical game retailers. However, unexpectedly, Ryan Cohen, chairman and CEO of GameStop, the largest well-known retailer in North America, is very concerned about this, and even directly stated that it has “no impact” on them.
During a recent appearance on the “Bloomberg Tech” show, Ryan Cohen inevitably talked about Sony’s digital policy. However, the executive stated categorically that this controversial change was “completely irrelevant” to GameStop.
According to him, “physical game sales” currently account for only a small part of GameStop’s business. As for the real biggest source of profit, it has gradually shifted to “peripheral products” in the past few years, such as market exchange cards or “Pokémon” related products. The game software sales segment continues to shrink. In fact, this development does not seem surprising.
Just earlier this year, GameStop announced their revenue report for the first quarter of the 2026 financial year, which showed that “peripheral merchandise” currently accounts for 29% of the entire company’s revenue. This proportion has exceeded the sales of video game software. Therefore, Ryan Cohen has stated many times that the sale of trading cards such as “Pokémon”, “Magic: The Gathering”, “Yu-Gi-Oh!”, or other peripheral collections is a natural extension of GameStop’s traditional “Buy-Sell-Trade” business model.
In addition to traditional retail forms, Ryan Cohen seems to have already set his sights on the more massive online e-commerce, and even planned to acquire the eBay platform for a price of up to $56 billion. Unfortunately, this transaction plan was ultimately rejected by the other party on the grounds that it was “uncredible and unattractive.”
Regardless, Ryan Cohen doesn’t have too strong a reaction to the fact that physical gaming may be officially going into history, which is in sharp contrast to the reaction of gamers and some industry insiders. At present, whenever PlayStation posts a post on the social platform, there will be an influx of dissatisfied criticism, and some players have even launched an online petition asking Sony to withdraw this policy. It has successfully attracted about 300,000 people to participate. In addition, well-known game producer Hideo Kojima also believes that this “digital future” is scary.
Source: KOCPC Chinese