Game publishers’ disc-free moonshot was floated in 2007; Sony’s deadline is 2028

Robert Bowling, a former Infinity Ward creative strategist for the Call of Duty franchise from 2006 to 2012, told Decrypt that he first heard discussions about cutting physical discs as far back as 2007, during the production of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Bowling said publishers had spent almost two decades pushing to stop disc production and go fully digital to maximize profits and shut down the second-hand market.

"At one point, it was floated by an executive at Activision [the Call of Duty publisher] that if we went entirely digital and stopped printing on discs, they could avoid the resell conversation entirely, and they'd control the market for their games," Bowling told Decrypt. "It would also evade the disc fee charged by Xbox and PlayStation to have your game on an Xbox disc or PlayStation disc."

Behind the scenes, publishers tried to convince GameStop to share its revenue from second-hand games, but Bowling said GameStop won that battle, after which publishers looked to cut discs and kill the resale market entirely. "It was at that point that I raised the concern that we'd be trading the freedom and joy of collecting games purely for a profit increase," he said. "That felt counter to our culture as gamers and game developers."

The comments come amid controversy over Sony's decision to discontinue discs as of 2028. More than 387,000 people have signed a "Don't Kill the Disc" petition. PlayStation founder Ken Kutaragi defended Sony, claiming it was a "mentality issue" if gamers were upset by the decision to cut discs, while former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden called it a "heavily spreadsheeted decision" and said it damaged the company's reputation.

After six years at Infinity Ward, Bowling went on to work as a creative consultant at Electronic Arts on Battlefield V, Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. In 2021, he co-founded Midnight Society to build the crypto extraction shooter Deadrop, but left in 2025 as funding ran dry. He is now studio head of //18.bravo, which is developing a first-person shooter. Across his two decades in the video game industry, Bowling said publishers were the "only ones" pushing to cut physical discs because they sought better profit margins, lower production costs and a way to suppress the second-hand game market.