Sony scrapping physical PlayStation discs from 2028 has done something far worse for the company than annoy its fanbase, it's supplied a Dutch antitrust lawsuit with a gift-wrapped centerpiece. The consumer group Stichting Massaschade & Consument, running a campaign it calls "Fair PlayStation," is pursuing more than €400 million (roughly $457 million) in damages on behalf of an estimated 1.7 million Dutch PlayStation users. The core allegation is that Sony's 30% commission on every PlayStation Store sale, what the group brands the "Sony tax," inflates digital game prices because no rival storefront is allowed to undercut them. And Sony, by announcing it will remove discs entirely, has effectively volunteered to prove the lawsuit's point.
To understand why the disc decision is so damaging to Sony's legal position, you have to see how it demolishes the company's own defense. Sony's argument in cases like this has always leaned on the existence of choice, that players who feel the digital store is too expensive can simply buy a physical copy at retail, trade it in, or pick it up second-hand. That physical alternative was the pressure Valve, the thing that let Sony argue the market wasn't truly closed. Kill the disc, and you kill that argument stone dead. As the group's chair Lucia Melcherts put it, the end of discs "removes the last place where a PlayStation game could still be bought and sold at a competitive price," meaning "no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it." That's not just rhetoric, it's the monopoly claim stated almost as a plain description of Sony's new policy. The company has essentially confirmed the future the lawsuit was warning about.
The Numbers Behind the "Sony Tax"
The financial heart of the case is genuinely striking once you look at the figures the group is citing. It claims that because no competing shop can sell PlayStation digital games, players pay on average around 47% more for a digital title than they would for the same game on disc. In a country where the group says over 80% of console households own a PlayStation, that price gap compounds into an enormous collective overcharge, hence the €400 million-plus damages figure. The argument is structural rather than emotional, with Melcherts stressing that the group doesn't object to Sony winning the console market on merit, but rather to Sony "using that dominance to shut out every other seller." A digital PlayStation game can't be legally purchased anywhere but Sony's own store, so there's simply no external force pushing the price down. Remove discs, and even the imperfect competition of the retail and resale markets vanishes, leaving Sony as the sole gatekeeper of pricing, discounts, and even how long a purchase remains accessible.
Sony Is Getting Squeezed on Three Continents at Once
In the UK, a roughly £2 billion action dubbed "PlayStation You Owe Us," brought by consumer advocate Alex Neill, ran a ten-week trial at London's Competition Appeal Tribunal earlier this year and is now awaiting a ruling, with potential damages of around £182 per class member. In the United States, a narrower class action over Sony pulling digital download codes from third-party retailers in 2019 secured preliminary approval for a $7.85 million settlement, reached without any admission of wrongdoing. The Dutch suit, filed under the country's WAMCA framework that allows opt-out class damages claims, cleared its first jurisdictional hearing at the end of June and is pressing ahead. Three major markets, three simultaneous legal challenges, all targeting the same closed-store model, and all of them strengthened by Sony's decision to eliminate the one competitive alternative that remained. The timing is close to self-sabotage. Whether or not the disc move made Business sense on a spreadsheet, it has walked Sony straight into the argument its opponents have spent years trying to build, and handed it to them fully formed. If any of these cases lands, Sony could be forced to open its platform to third-party sellers or cut its commission, which is precisely the outcome the whole all-digital strategy was designed to avoid.
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