Friday July 24, 2026
Sony Isn’t Killing the Disc. It’s Killing Resale.
Sony plans to stop pressing discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028, and the framing around this news misses what is happening. This is not a format going obsolete the way cassettes did. It is the closing move in a twenty-year campaign by publishers to eliminate the resale market, and while the deadline is still eighteen months out, the outcome is no longer in question.
Think about what a disc is economically. It still has value after it has been used, and that value works on the buyer and the publisher in opposite directions. The buyer is not really paying $70 for the game, because he knows he can recover about $25 of it at the trade-in counter, which brings the real cost closer to $45. The publisher, on the other hand, has to price new games against those used copies sitting on the shelf at $40, so it never fully controls what a new release can command.
Americans spent about $1.6 billion on new physical games in the twelve months through May, down from $11.5 billion in 2009. The volume is already gone, but resale is not, and a publisher earns nothing on a used copy that competes with its new one on the same shelf. Starting in 2028, the used disc stops existing for new games.
So who gains when the disc disappears? Sony now takes 30%+ of every game sold on its store, forever, with no used copies undercutting it. The shelf at Walmart turns into an ad, since a box with a download code inside is really just a billboard that happens to scan at the register. And the next console gets cheaper to build without a disc drive, which is the part that breaks most often anyway.
Nobody will call it a price increase, and no publisher will announce one, but a 50%+ jump in the real cost of a game is exactly what this will bring.
◾ Senate Majority Leader says Clarity Act unlikely to pass before summer recess (CoinDesk)
◾ Reps. Lieu (D-CA), Moran (R-TX) introduce bill mandating AI kill switches (Rep. Lieu)
◾ Nevada lawmakers introduce bill banning sports betting via prediction markets (Nevada Independent)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ White House monitoring after OpenAI models escaped containment, hacked Hugging Face systems (Fox Business)
◾ EU bars Belarusians from owning crypto service providers under MiCA (EUR-Lex)
◾ EU fines $GOOGL $1B for favoring own services, restricting app developers (WSJ)
◾ SEC announces roundtable on 24-hour trading preparations (Newsfile)
◾ Kazakhstan approves strategic crypto mining rules, effective August 1 (Zakon.kz)
◾ Indian court rules OpenAI did not infringe news agency content to train ChatGPT (Reuters)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Financial updates:
Intel $INTC Q2’26: Revenue $16.1B +25% y/y | Op income $1.8B | Net loss $11.0B (Business Wire)
◾ Empery Digital $EMPD buys 8% stake in Cardinal Data Power for $20M (Business Wire)
◾ Galaxy Digital prices $3.5B senior secured notes (PR Newswire)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Bitcoin mining pool Poolin files Chapter 11 (PacerMonitor)
◾ Amazon $AMZN shutting AI agent research lab (The Information)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ Gemini $GEMI donates $10M in bitcoin to Trump’s MAGA PAC after joint motion with CFTC to reverse $5M settlement (Cointelegraph)
◾ Coinbase enables AI agents to pay businesses, execute crypto trades (Crypto Briefing)
◾ Ripple launches Mint platform for institutions to access, mint, redeem, manage RLUSD (Ripple)
◾ MoonPay adds Discover $DFS network support for crypto trading (Finextra)
◾ Bitget registers as New Zealand financial services provider (Bitget)
◾ Korbit rebranding as Digital X (Herald Business)
◾ Stripe in talks to acquire AI model marketplace OpenRouter (WSJ)
◾ BIT Brokerage launches US stock options trading (PR Newswire)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ Anthropic calls for industry-wide AI safety standards amid rising rogue-model risks (Fox Business)
◾ ChatGPT introduces health features connecting Apple Health, supported medical records (OpenAI)
◾ Claude introduces voice mode for Sonnet, Opus models (Engadget)
◾ Microsoft $MSFT replacing OpenAI image models in PowerPoint, Bing (Seattle Times)
◾ Moonshot AI accessed Nvidia chips despite Chinese export ban (CNBC)
◾ $AMD, Cerebras $CBRS pair chips for faster, more efficient AI inference (Cerebras)
◾ OpenAI backs Musk proposal for frequent AI safety meetings among leading developers (The Information)
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ Polymarket to fight France’s ANJ website block in court (PR Newswire)
◾ Amazon $AMZN pushing AI redesign for Prime Video (Reuters)
◾ Amazon $AMZN adding Luna games to Prime Video (PCMag)
◾ Xbox begins ad-supported game streaming (Xbox)
◾ Amazon $AMZN to require third-party sellers label AI-generated images (CNBC)
◾ Crypto.com’s OG sues Washington State to preempt Kalshi-style prediction market crackdown (Gambling Insider)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ SpaceX to retry Starship launch tonight after weather delays (SpaceX)
◾ SpaceX $SPCX turning away satellite operators seeking dedicated Falcon 9 rides beyond 2028 (Bloomberg)
◾ NASA to test SpaceX, Blue Origin lunar landers before next moon landing (ScienceDaily)
◾ China’s Shijian-31 launched to Molniya orbit for view of GEO activity (SpaceNews)