Sony is ending PS5 discs in 2028, just as PS5 games start to run elsewhere

No new PlayStation games on disc after January 2028. Meanwhile a firmware 13.60 jailbreak and three young PS5 emulators are changing what owning a PS5 game can mean.

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From January 2028, Sony will stop pressing discs for new PlayStation games. That plan, announced in July, has hung over every PS5 conversation since. In the last week of September two other things happened that bear on it: a PS5 jailbreak arrived that works on far more consoles than any before it, and three separate efforts to run PS5 games on a PC all showed real progress. None of this changes Sony's plan. It does change what owning a PS5 game might look like in ten years.

What Sony actually said

According to TechCrunch's report on the announcement, every new release after the cutoff will be sold digitally, while games released before it stay available on disc. Sony called it “a natural direction” as “the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs”, and the numbers back the trend: digital made up 85% of full-game sales on PS4 and PS5 in the last quarter of its 2025 financial year. The same day, Sony said the PS3 store would close in some markets this year and the PS3 and Vita stores everywhere next year, with past purchases still downloadable “for the foreseeable future”.

That phrase is the whole worry. A disc does not need a store to stay open. RPCS3, the PS3 emulator, made the point in September when it added support for playing PS3 games on a PC straight from a Blu-ray drive. In the words of its announcement, quoted by Power Up Gaming, owning games as physical media lets you play them “without relying on any servers”.

The jailbreak that reaches firmware 13.60

The Relapse exploit, released on 29 September, works on any PS5 up to firmware 13.60, which came out in July, Ars Technica reports. Earlier exploits needed years-old firmware, so most people could only use them on second-hand consoles that had never been updated. Relapse starts from an old WebKit flaw in the PS5's browser and works up to kernel access. Older methods could hang the console for 50 minutes per attempt. Consoles updated to 14.00 in mid-September are not covered.

Because most PS5 games need the firmware that was current when they came out, a newer exploit opens up many more of them. Ars describes the legitimate use as personal backups of digital games people have bought, alongside homebrew such as emulators and unofficial 60fps patches for PS4 games.

Three ways onto a PC

The same week, Ars rounded up PS5 emulation, and the picture is busier than it was in the spring. SharpEmu, by a developer called CursedIfElse, went from a “very early alpha” in May to ten tested games reaching a playable state, six of them “fully playable at 60 fps”, including Astro Bot and the Demon's Souls remake. KytyPS5, a bigger version of the PS4 emulator Kyty, had its first public release and lists 134 titles with “controllable gameplay”, many with serious bugs. AnyPS5 takes a third route: it relinks a game's original x86 code so it runs as a native PC program, and has Dreaming Sarah playable and Dead Cells running as a proof of concept.

Ars is careful to say a majority of the PS5 library running well on a PC is still a long way off. It also notes that Sony has said it will make fewer of its own PC ports, which makes the community effort matter more.

Where that leaves a collector

Put together, the trend points one way. Sony is moving new games to licences that live on its servers. The ways to keep a game working without those servers are coming from outside Sony: emulators that read a disc you own, and jailbreaks that depend on firmware you chose not to update. For anything released after 2028 there will be no disc to read. Whether those games outlast the store will depend on what Sony offers for keeping what you bought, and so far it has offered only that past purchases stay downloadable for the foreseeable future.

Sources

Image: Ars Technica

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