With Grand Theft Auto 6 now only months away, almost anything Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick says is inevitably going to be viewed through the lens of what is shaping up to be the biggest game launch of 2026.
Yet one of the more consequential comments from Take-Two’s latest earnings discussion had very little to do with GTA 6 itself.
Asked about Sony’s recent decision to end production of physical PlayStation game discs for new releases from January 2028, Zelnick declined to comment directly on Sony’s strategy. He was considerably less reserved about where Take-Two believes the industry is headed, however.
“Our business is well over 90% digitally distributed as it is,” Zelnick said. “It’s already a digital business.”
For Take-Two, the conclusion appears fairly straightforward. Players are already overwhelmingly buying games digitally, internet connectivity is increasingly required anyway, and downloading a game is generally more convenient than buying it on a disc.
“So if you’re already connected, like, who cares if you download digitally, it’s all the same and it’s much more convenient,” Zelnick said. “So that’s where the world is going, in our opinion.”
Commercially, it is difficult to argue with the direction of travel. Sony itself made much the same argument when announcing that new PlayStation games will no longer be produced on physical discs beginning in January 2028, pointing to consumer preference increasingly shifting toward digital distribution.
Zelnick even suggested physical releases could eventually resemble vinyl records, surviving as occasional products for collectors rather than remaining the default way games are sold.
The problem is that “who cares?” skips over a fairly important distinction. Digital and physical games might deliver much the same experience when you press play. They do not necessarily give the person who paid for them the same control over what happens afterwards.
Convenience Isn’t The Same Thing As Ownership
There is an obvious reason digital distribution has become dominant: it is incredibly convenient.
There is no trip to a shop, no delivery to wait for and no disc to swap when you want to play something else. For publishers, meanwhile, digital distribution removes much of the manufacturing and logistics involved with getting physical products onto shelves.
None of that makes digital purchasing inherently bad. What it does mean is that using digital sales figures alone to justify the disappearance of physical media risks confusing what consumers find easiest with what is ultimately best for them.
Sony’s own UK PlayStation terms make the distinction unusually clear. When someone purchases a digital product through the PlayStation Store, they are buying “a personal licence” to use it rather than ownership of the digital product itself. That licence is also generally non-transferable.
A physical disc offers something materially different even in an era where patches, online authentication and additional downloads can complicate the old idea that everything needed to play a game permanently lives inside a box.
It is an object players can possess, lend and, depending on the product and platform, resell. More importantly, it supports an entire secondary market that exists independently of the publisher that originally sold the game. Remove the disc and you remove much of that agency with it.
There is a particularly awkward irony here given the game hovering over Take-Two’s entire financial year. GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, a date Rockstar reaffirmed after delaying the game from its previous May release.
And Rockstar’s current plan already demonstrates how blurred the meaning of a “physical edition” can become. The company says GTA 6’s physical version will contain a download code inside the box rather than the game on a conventional playable disc.
That certainly lends weight to Zelnick’s point about enormous modern games making traditional physical distribution increasingly awkward.
It also shows why the distinction matters. A box containing a digital entitlement preserves the shelf presence of physical media without necessarily preserving the things players valued about physical ownership in the first place.
Take-Two is hardly alone in following the numbers. If more than 90% of its business is already digitally distributed, it would be strange for the company not to build its strategy around that reality.
But markets do not merely respond to consumer behaviour. Companies shape that behaviour by deciding which options remain available.
If physical editions become rarer, digital purchasing becomes more dominant. That dominance can then be cited as evidence that players no longer want physical products, encouraging publishers to reduce them further. Eventually, consumer preference risks becoming something closer to consumer inevitability.
Sony has already decided where that process ends for PlayStation. From January 2028, newly released games on its consoles will be digital-only.
Zelnick clearly believes the wider industry is heading to much the same place. He may well be right. The question is not whether digital games are more convenient. They plainly are, and millions of players have voted with their wallets accordingly.
The more interesting question is what gaming loses once convenience becomes the only option. Because when physical games finally become gaming’s equivalent of vinyl, publishers will have gained more than cheaper distribution. Players will have lost resale, transferability and one more piece of control over the games they pay for. That is quite a lot hiding behind “who cares?”
