Dominic Snyder 💿

Luke Raley is dealing with a sore elbow and is not in the lineup.

PlayStation going digital in 2028 is more of a stopgap than a strategy, I reckon. This is short-term margin harvesting during a rough period. It’s PlayStation buying time. The bet is that today’s cost squeeze is a phase and not a permanent state. Hopefully, the component crisis eases once the AI-datacentre gold rush stops devouring the world’s memory and storage supply, hardware gets cheaper to make again, and the macro picture (interest rates, cost-of-living pressure on discretionary spend) softens. Going disc-less keeps revenue-per-player growing through that, propping up the numbers while the underlying economics are ugly, so that when conditions do normalise, PlayStation comes out the other side with margins intact and the business still showing growth. It’s a bridge across the bad years. The risk, of course, is that the bridge doesn’t reach anywhere better. And another important bridge will also get burned in the process. Budget-conscious and younger players enter the console ecosystem through cheap pre-owned discs, then get locked in by buying digital DLC, subscribing to PS Plus, and building a friend list they won’t walk away from. Killing physical media boards up one of the cheapest doorways into PlayStation. In a gen where consoles cost $700+ and games hit $80, kicking down the cheap ladder accelerates audience split. Outside of the sports games, casuals and youngsters will drift off to mobile, PC, and free-to-play even faster. Squeezing every buyer onto high-margin digital channels is what platform holders do when underlying console economics are under pressure. Component inflation, ballooning AAA budgets, flat install bases, and post-pandemic readjustment are part of this. So no discs will shore up revenue per player today, but the funnel feeding the platform tomorrow shrinks. If console hardware costs ever drop, this looks short-sighted. If they don’t, it looks like managed decline. Either way, it is a lever pulled under heavy pressure. And it’s a new base line in a world where the number needs to keep going up.

When you’ve beat the joy out of Aaron Goldsmith, you know things are going bad.

Driven away from pirated digital libraries by a massive $1.5 billion settlement, major AI companies have found a legal loophole: bulk-buying physical books, shearing off the spines for high-speed scanning, and then throwing the originals away. The practice, known as "destructive scanning," involves using hydraulic cutting machines to neatly slice the spines off used and sometimes rare books. The loose pages are then rapidly processed through industrial scanners to extract the text for AI training data, before the physical remains are sent to recycling facilities. Anthropic’s internal initiative, referred to as "Project Panama," reportedly aimed to destructively scan up to two million books over a six-month period. The pivot to physical books comes after a federal judge ruled that training AI on legally purchased physical media constitutes "fair use," even if the original physical copy is destroyed in the process. The ruling effectively closed the door on using pirated digital shadow libraries, making physical books the final frontier for acquiring massive, legally defensible datasets. What are your thoughts on this? Share them in the comments.

I’m working on a PS5 physical manual for Marvel Tokon! It will have the move list for each character so you can have it in front of you while playing. The open beta this weekend was super helpful in giving me a head start on making it!

I don't know what it is, I can't be excited about video games that are coming out like I used to ever since PlayStation announced the death of physical media 🫤