The special PS5-only physical Revered Edition of Mortal Shell 2 has sold out, its publisher has announced — and gamers are sending the news Sony’s way as they continue to push the company to reverse its decision to do away with discs.
Sony will stop production of discs for new PlayStation games released from 2028 onwards, angering some fans who have expressed concern about preservation and long-term ownership. Gamers continue to flood PlayStation social media posts with angry responses, and are even starting to overshadow the release of new games that have nothing to do with Sony’s policy.
The Mortal Shell 2 Revered Edition includes the game on disc, a 100+ page softcover artbook, a steelbook, and three fine art prints all inside a collector´s tuck-in box. Publisher Playstack has said demand for it has “exceeded expectations,” and has essentially sold out just eight days after pre-orders went live.
“Due to the Mortal Shell 2’s release date of August 20, and the manufacturing time required to replenish stock, there is a very low chance of additional physical copies becoming available before the game’s release,” the publisher continued. “We are working with our distribution partner to review ongoing demand and we’ll update as soon as we hear their decision on next steps. To be clear, there is no guarantee of a stock replenishment plan after launch as this decision is not ours to make.”
Of course, there’s no word on exactly how many units of the Revered Edition were manufactured for launch, and it’s important to note that the standard physical edition of Mortal Shell 2 on PS5 remains available to buy. But that hasn’t stopped gamers from using the situation with Mortal Shell 2 as evidence that Sony has got this very wrong.
@PlayStation oh look people want physical games so much they sell out you pieces of shit. pic.twitter.com/xUbmqFrQEn
— mike (@mik9873) July 16, 2026
I thought Sony said Physical Media was dead. That is too bad, No disk No buy pic.twitter.com/bp9D7KKj50
— Yo (@PlasmaWave42) July 16, 2026
Man, and we were being gaslight into believing nobody buys physical. How strange
— AltLix (@xAdamxLix) July 16, 2026
We’ve already reported on how new games are getting caught up in the ongoing Sony backlash. The digital-only Denshattack!, for example, launched yesterday and angry gamers swarmed on PlayStation’s social media posts promoting the release, even warning people against buying it on Sony’s console.
Will Sony reverse its decision? Every analyst we’ve spoken to about this has said there’s no chance. Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games, suggested that even if half a million people cancelled their PlayStation Plus subscription in protest, it would be just a drop in the ocean for Sony — which is not going to change its mind.
“I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision,” Toto told IGN. “They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.
“Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users,” he continued. “Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let’s say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough for Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative.”
For Sony, going all-digital for new game releases will earn it more money from every sale at a time when console sales are expected to plummet due to their rising cost. For a first-party PlayStation game such as The Last of Us, Sony will only keep around 65% of the money from a physical copy, with around 30% going to the retailer and roughly another 5% on manufacturing costs. Meanwhile, for a physical copy of a third-party game such as the Activision-published Call of Duty, Sony will get a licensing fee, likely around 15%.
For downloads, however, the margins are much higher. For a first-party game sold via Sony’s own PlayStation Store, the company obviously keeps 100% of the revenue. For third-party games such as Call of Duty, meanwhile, Sony keeps a 30% cut (so, roughly $21 for a $70 game).
Piers Harding-Rolls, games industry analyst at Ampere, has said the data backs this up, and that a lot has changed over the course of the last two generations. “Console gaming is the last hold-out for physical media in the gaming sector, but physical product has been declining in importance,” he said in a post on the Ampere website. “Back in 2013 when the PS4 launched, Ampere data shows that only 13% of total full games unit sales for Sony consoles were digital (including digital-only games). Fast forward to 2025, and this digital share of full game purchases stood at almost 80% of the total.
“Inevitably there will be concerns from PlayStation gamers around various aspects of this announcement including choice, accessing older physical games on new consoles, the ability to collect physical games, and game preservation, however the purchasing trends of gamers are clear.”
One analyst said fans of physical media had their chance and blew it, so there’s no going back. “If gamers and preservationists had bought more physical games, Sony wouldn’t have seen the digital sales ratios that justify this decision,” Robin Zhu, a games analyst at Bernstein, told the Financial Times.
“Digital game sales carry essentially 100% incremental margin… the cost of the physical package, shipping and retailer margins can be more than 20% per cent of sticker price.”
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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