Hideki Kamiya has spent a career switching from disc-based classics like Resident Evil 2 and Okami to a digital-only buying habit, and in a new interview he says that shift doesn’t bother him at all. What does bother him: the fact that so many of the games he helped shape a generation on are quietly disappearing. In an interview reported by Video Games Chronicle and summarized by IGN on September 5, 2026, the Bayonetta and Devil May Cry co-creator waved off the years-long physical-versus-digital argument that has consumed gaming forums and instead pointed at a bigger problem: publishers letting old games rot on hardware nobody can boot anymore.
The comments land at an unusually charged moment for the broader gaming industry. Sony confirmed on July 1, 2026 that it will stop producing physical discs for new PlayStation titles starting in January 2028, a decision that reignited a fight between console makers, preservationists and players over who is responsible for keeping decades of game history playable. Kamiya’s take cuts through that noise: he says format is a distraction, and the real test is whether IP holders will keep games running at all.
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What Kamiya Told Video Games Chronicle
According to the VGC interview, Kamiya was blunt about his own habits. “I don’t buy a single physical game these days – every single game I buy is 100% digital,” he told the outlet, framing his own shopping cart as evidence of where the industry was always heading. That admission alone would be a mildly interesting footnote from a developer known for directing some of gaming’s most physical, tactile action titles. What makes it newsworthy is what he said next.
Kamiya told VGC that “that’s the big thing for me, is whether or not the IP holders are going to take responsibility for ensuring that all of these games will continue to be available to future generations in order for them to be played.” He went further, telling the outlet that “whether that’s physically or digitally is less important to me, just so long as these games will be available to people in the future,” before summarizing his position plainly: “So to me it’s less important whether the games are made available physically or digitally, but that they’re made available at all,” per the VGC interview.
Reporting from GamesRadar+ and PCGuide both frame the remarks the same way: Kamiya isn’t mourning discs, he’s warning that the industry has no real plan for what happens to a catalog once nobody is selling it anymore. Neither report cites him naming a specific title he’s worried about, and no numerical figures for lost sales or specific dollar amounts were attributed to Kamiya himself in the interview coverage.
Why the Timing Matters: Sony’s January 2028 Disc Cutoff
Kamiya’s comments didn’t happen in a vacuum. On July 1, 2026, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that physical disc production for all new PlayStation games will end starting January 2028. New titles releasing before that date can still ship on disc, and existing discs will keep working on current hardware, but from 2028 onward every new PlayStation release goes digital-only, aside from boxed retail products that contain a download code rather than a disc.
Sony has attributed the move to a straightforward reading of consumer behavior: digital purchases have “significantly outpaced” physical discs for years, and the company sees little reason to keep funding disc manufacturing for a shrinking slice of the market. That framing is echoed across coverage of the decision, though critics have pointed out that ending discs also quietly kills the ability to resell, lend or trade new PlayStation games, a business that retailers and secondhand markets have relied on for decades.
Sony’s move is what gave VGC’s interviewer an obvious reason to ask Kamiya, a developer whose career is built on titles now considered classics, how he felt about it. His answer, that the format war is a distraction from preservation, reframes a debate that had mostly been fought over convenience and collector value into one about long-term access to gaming’s back catalog.
The 87% Problem: Video Game History Foundation’s Preservation Crisis
Kamiya’s warning about games “not playable on modern hardware at all” lines up with hard data that preservationists have been citing for years. The Video Game History Foundation, working with the Software Preservation Network, published a landmark study in 2023 titled “87% Missing: The Disappearance of Classic Video Games.” Surveying roughly 1,500 titles released in the United States before 2010, the study found that just 13.27% of classic games remain commercially available in any legitimate form, whether through reissues, remasters, retro compilations or digital re-releases.
The numbers get worse the further back the study looked: availability never exceeded roughly 20% for any single platform or console generation, and dropped below 3% for games released before 1985. That’s the backdrop against which Kamiya’s comments about “so many of these older classic games that are not playable on modern hardware” should be read. It isn’t hyperbole from a nostalgic developer, it’s a documented, measured gap that a nonprofit spent years quantifying.
The foundation’s director, Frank Cifaldi, has been outspoken since Sony’s disc announcement. Coverage from GamesRadar+ and other outlets notes that the organization has pushed the Entertainment Software Association for “meaningful solutions” on preserving digital-only content, arguing that without industry cooperation, informal copying remains the only practical way many games survive long-term. That tension between rights holders protecting revenue and archivists trying to protect history is exactly the gap Kamiya is pointing at when he says it’s the IP holders’ responsibility, not the format, that determines whether a game culture actually endures.
Digital vs Physical Game Sales in 2026, by the Numbers
The shift Kamiya describes in his own buying habits mirrors what’s happening across the industry, just compressed into a single anecdote. Global digital distribution now accounts for roughly 95% of all game sales, inside a market industry trackers value at around $188.8 billion for 2025. On the console side, Sony’s own reporting shows PlayStation full-game sales running between 78% and 85% digital depending on the quarter, while Xbox software sales sit closer to 90% digital. Nintendo remains the outlier: the company’s Q1 FY2027 results, covering March 30 through June 30, 2026, show 61.5% of software sales as digital, which leaves a striking 38.5% still sold on physical cartridges.
US retail data tells a starker story about the boxed market specifically. Circana figures reported by VGChartz put total US physical game revenue at roughly $1.5 billion for 2025, the weakest year for boxed games since the 1990s, down about 11% from the prior year. Monthly figures from mid-2026 look even thinner: US consumer spending on disc games hit just $85 million in July 2026, the worst single month Circana has recorded since it started tracking the category in 1995.
| Platform | Digital Share of Full-Game Sales | Physical Share | Reporting Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| PlayStation (PS4/PS5) | 78% – 85% | 15% – 22% | Sony FY2025 quarterly reports |
| Xbox | ~90% | ~10% | 2026 industry estimates |
| Nintendo Switch / Switch 2 | 61.5% | 38.5% | Nintendo Q1 FY2027 (Mar 30 – Jun 30, 2026) |
| PC | Near 100% | Negligible | Industry-wide estimate, 2026 |
| Global (all platforms combined) | ~95% | ~5% | 2025 global market, ~$188.8B |
From Resident Evil 2 to Okami: Why Kamiya’s Voice Carries Weight
Kamiya isn’t a random developer weighing in on a hot-button industry topic. He directed Resident Evil 2 at Capcom, then moved to Capcom’s internal Clover Studio, where he directed Okami, one of the most acclaimed action-adventure titles of its era. After Clover closed, he co-founded PlatinumGames, where he created and directed Bayonetta, and he’s widely credited as co-creator of Devil May Cry, the game that arguably defined the modern character-action genre.
His concern about preservation isn’t a new position, either. In a 2021 interview reported by Nintendo Life, Kamiya said that “if people want to play a classic game and they can’t, because it’s not available on new platforms and can’t be found in its original form either, that’s like a threat… it’s holding game culture back.” Five years later, the same argument is showing up in a different interview, only now it’s aimed directly at the physical-versus-digital debate that Sony’s disc decision reopened.
Reports also note that Kamiya is currently working on a new entry in the Okami series through Clovers Studio, a new outfit distinct from the original Clover Studio that closed in 2007. That detail matters: a developer actively revisiting one of his own signature IPs has a direct, personal stake in whether decades-old game catalogs remain accessible, not just an abstract industry opinion. Community-driven efforts like RetroAchievements, which now tracks progress across 54 legacy systems, show how much grassroots demand exists for keeping older catalogs alive even where publishers haven’t stepped in.
Nintendo, Xbox and Sony: Three Different Preservation Paths
The three major console makers are now taking visibly different approaches to the same pressure. Nintendo remains the most physical-friendly of the three, with 38.5% of software sales still sold on cartridge as of its most recent quarter, and reporting around the figure suggests the company has no near-term plan to abandon cartridges on Switch or Switch 2.
Microsoft has leaned the opposite direction on new purchases, with roughly 90% of Xbox software sales already digital, but the company has simultaneously invested in preservation-adjacent features for existing libraries. In late August 2026, Xbox began testing a disc-to-digital feature that lets owners of Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S disc games insert a supported disc and claim a permanent digital entitlement tied to that copy, rolling out first to Xbox Insiders on August 31, 2026. Circana data from the same period shows just how far Xbox has drifted from physical retail already: Xbox titles accounted for only about 4% of new US physical game sales in 2026, against 63% for Nintendo and 32% for PlayStation.
Sony sits in the middle in terms of current digital share but is moving fastest toward a hard cutoff, ending new physical releases entirely by January 2028 without, so far, pairing that decision with a comparable preservation initiative of its own. That asymmetry, one company adding digital claim features for existing discs while another eliminates new discs outright, is a large part of why Kamiya’s comments resonated with outlets covering the platform holders’ differing strategies.
| Platform Holder | New-Release Physical Media Stance | Preservation-Related Move in 2026 | US Physical Retail Share (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nintendo | Continuing cartridges on Switch and Switch 2 | No formal preservation program announced | 63% |
| PlayStation (Sony) | Ending new discs from January 2028 | None paired with the disc-exit announcement | 32% |
| Xbox (Microsoft) | Already ~90% digital on new titles | Disc-to-digital entitlement testing began Aug 31, 2026 | ~4% |
The Legal Wall: DMCA, the Copyright Office, and “Piracy as Preservation”
Even developers and publishers who want to preserve old games run into a legal ceiling. The US Copyright Office’s most recent triennial rulemaking on Section 1201 of the DMCA, finalized in October 2024 and still governing the 2025-2026 period, denied a request from libraries, archives and the Video Game History Foundation to expand preservation exemptions to allow remote, off-premises access to preserved games. The office found petitioners hadn’t shown that remote access would qualify as fair use, and cited concerns about market harm to legacy game sales.
What survived is a narrow, on-premises exemption: qualifying libraries, archives and museums can legally bypass copy protection to make older games playable, but only on-site, for one user at a time, and only for scholarship, research or teaching. Streaming a preserved game to a researcher’s home computer, or running a public-facing emulation server, remains outside the law even for institutions doing preservation work in good faith. Details on the current status of the Copyright Office’s rulemaking process are available directly through the US Copyright Office.
That legal gap is precisely why Cifaldi’s organization has, in the wake of Sony’s disc announcement, publicly aligned itself with the position that “piracy is the only extant form of media preservation that exists in games right now.” It’s an uncomfortable statement for a nonprofit built around legitimate archival work to make, but it reflects years of failed attempts to secure workable exemptions through the regulatory process. Kamiya’s framing, that responsibility sits with IP holders rather than with format, effectively sidesteps this legal fight, but the fight is exactly why his comments landed with the weight they did.
Europe and California Tried to Legislate Preservation. Both Stalled.
Regulators on two continents have tried, and largely failed, to force the issue this year. In the European Union, the “Stop Destroying Videogames” citizens’ initiative collected roughly 1.3 million signatures pushing the European Commission to require publishers to keep games playable after official support ends. The Commission formally rejected the request on June 16, 2026, saying it could not propose a legal obligation to keep games playable and would instead pursue a voluntary industry code of conduct on end-of-life practices.
California’s “Protect Our Games Act,” known as AB 1921, took a similar run at the problem domestically, aiming to regulate how live-service games are shut down and what preservation obligations publishers owe players. The Entertainment Software Association has publicly opposed the bill, arguing that regulation could discourage future game development given how many titles depend on complex, evolving licensed technology. An earlier, related state-level preservation push also failed in committee, underscoring how hard it has been for lawmakers to translate preservation advocacy into enforceable rules.
The pattern across both fights is consistent: publishers and their trade groups resist binding preservation mandates, citing intellectual property rights and development costs, while regulators opt for voluntary frameworks that carry no real enforcement teeth. That’s the exact vacuum Kamiya is describing when he says responsibility has to fall on IP holders directly, because neither courts nor legislatures have shown much appetite to impose it on them.
Market Impact: What a Digital-Only Future Means for Publishers and Resellers
The commercial stakes behind this debate are larger than nostalgia. US spending on boxed console games has collapsed from roughly $11.5 billion in 2009 to about $1.5 billion in 2025, an 86% decline over 16 years, according to figures compiled from Circana retail tracking. That decline squeezes an entire secondary ecosystem: used-game retailers, disc resale marketplaces and rental services that depended on a physical product changing hands multiple times after its initial sale.
Sony’s move to end new discs by 2028 accelerates that squeeze specifically for PlayStation, since digital licenses generally can’t be resold or lent the way a disc can. For publishers, going digital-only removes manufacturing and distribution costs and, notably, removes the resale market that competes with full-price digital sales, an incentive critics have pointed to when questioning how much of the shift is about consumer preference versus margin protection.
For preservation specifically, the market impact cuts the other way. Physical media, whatever its resale downsides for publishers, has historically been the format most likely to survive server shutdowns, storefront closures and DRM changes. A cartridge from 1995 still boots today; a digital license tied to a storefront that closes does not. Kamiya’s insistence that format matters less than IP-holder responsibility only holds up if publishers actually build durable digital preservation systems, something none of the three major platform holders has fully committed to doing at scale.
How Kamiya’s Stance Compares to Other Developers
Kamiya’s relatively pragmatic framing, that he’s fine going all-digital as long as access is guaranteed, sits in contrast with other high-profile developers who have voiced more pessimistic views on the same shift away from physical media. Coverage of comments from other well-known creators around Sony’s disc decision suggests a more skeptical read on where a fully digital industry is headed, though those remarks fall outside the scope of Kamiya’s own comments and shouldn’t be conflated with his position.
What separates Kamiya’s take from a simple “physical media is dying, get over it” argument is the specific responsibility he places on rights holders. He isn’t arguing digital is inherently fine; he’s arguing that digital is fine only if publishers treat long-term availability as a real obligation rather than an afterthought. That’s a meaningfully different position from either the format purists who insist discs must survive, or the platform holders who frame the shift purely in terms of consumer convenience and cost savings.
What Comes Next: Five Predictions
Based on the current trajectory across platform holders, regulators and preservation groups, a few outcomes look likely over the next 12 to 24 months.
- Nintendo becomes the last major holdout on physical media. With 38.5% of sales still physical and no stated plan to drop cartridges, Nintendo is positioned to inherit an outsized share of whatever US physical retail market remains once Sony’s cutoff takes effect.
- Xbox expands disc-to-digital beyond the Insider test. Given Microsoft’s heavy digital lean already, broadening the claim-your-disc-as-digital program looks like the lower-friction path to a full public rollout rather than a permanent Insiders-only feature.
- Pressure builds on Sony to pair its disc exit with a preservation commitment. Continued criticism from groups like the Video Game History Foundation makes it increasingly likely Sony announces some form of legacy-access initiative before the January 2028 cutoff, if only to blunt reputational pressure.
- The EU’s voluntary code of conduct produces limited results. Without binding obligations, expect publisher compliance with the Commission’s preservation code to be inconsistent, prompting renewed advocacy campaigns rather than a resolved issue.
- More developers speak out publicly on preservation. As physical retail keeps shrinking and shutdowns of live-service titles continue drawing criticism, expect more current and former developers to follow Kamiya’s lead in separating the format debate from the preservation debate.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly did Hideki Kamiya say about physical versus digital games?
According to an interview reported by Video Games Chronicle and summarized by IGN on September 5, 2026, Kamiya said he personally buys all his games digitally now, but that the format doesn’t matter to him as much as whether IP holders keep games available for future generations to play.
Is Hideki Kamiya still working at PlatinumGames?
No. Kamiya left PlatinumGames, the studio he co-founded, and has since been associated with Clovers Studio, where reports indicate he is working on a new entry in the Okami series.
When does Sony stop making physical PlayStation discs?
Sony announced on July 1, 2026 that physical disc production for new PlayStation games ends starting January 2028. Games releasing on disc before that date, and all previously released discs, remain playable on existing hardware.
What percentage of classic video games are actually out of print?
The Video Game History Foundation’s 2023 study found that 87% of classic games released in the United States before 2010 are out of print, with only about 13.27% still commercially available in any legitimate form.
Can libraries and archives legally preserve old video games?
To a limited extent. Under the current DMCA exemption, qualifying libraries, archives and museums can bypass copy protection to make games playable, but only on-site, for one user at a time, for research or teaching purposes. Remote access remains illegal under the Copyright Office’s most recent ruling.
Which console maker sells the most physical games in 2026?
Nintendo leads by a wide margin. Circana data cited in 2026 reporting shows Nintendo accounting for roughly 63% of new US physical game sales, compared with 32% for PlayStation and about 4% for Xbox.
Did the European Union pass a law requiring game preservation?
No. The European Commission formally rejected the “Stop Destroying Videogames” citizens’ initiative on June 16, 2026, despite roughly 1.3 million signatures, opting instead for a voluntary industry code of conduct rather than a binding legal obligation.
What games is Hideki Kamiya known for creating?
Kamiya directed Resident Evil 2 at Capcom, directed Okami at Clover Studio, and later co-founded PlatinumGames, where he created and directed Bayonetta. He is also widely credited as a co-creator of Devil May Cry.
