Regissøren sier at den fysiske utgaven av Final Fantasy 7 Revelation ikke er garantert

Naoki Hamaguchi wants Final Fantasy 7 Revelation on a shelf and cannot promise it. The director of the remake trilogy told GamesRadar+ at the Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest in Berlin that Square Enix has not settled the product lineup for the final entry, and that a disc is one of the things still under discussion inside the company.

Revelation arrives early in 2027, a year before the cutoff Sony set for new PlayStation discs. In July the company published a blog post, and then Sony announced that disc production for all new PlayStation games ends in January 2028, with retail sales moving to digital formats after that. Revelation lands on the safe side of that calendar, so the choice belongs to Square Enix rather than to Sony.

Hamaguchi said he is working to arrange some kind of physical edition, without saying what shape it takes. Platform rules complicate the choice. Nintendo's game-key cards carry storage limits, disc capacity differs by console, and each first-party holder sets its own regulations that Square Enix has to build the SKU around. He pointed to future announcements for anything firmer.

Hamaguchi also knows what happens if the products get announced without one.

"They're going to rip me to pieces."

— Naoki Hamaguchi

He framed physical media as a culture rather than a format. At Fan Fest and community events, players bring boxes for him to sign, and he said losing that would be a shame. He also accepted the direction of the market, that the general trend runs from physical toward downloadable games, and separated that trend from what he wants personally.

His fallback is broader than a disc. Hamaguchi expects some kind of packaged edition to survive whatever happens to optical media: a box with a code inside, key cards like Nintendo's, or a boot disc. Nintendo is already selling that middle ground on Switch 2, where game-key cards sit on shelves and the digital version costs roughly ten dollars less.

I read the key card line as the version of this I would actually take, because a card in a case is still an object I can lend or resell, and a download code is a receipt. I also have no problem with discs turning into retro objects after 2028, since hunting them down gets more interesting with every year that passes.

The trilogy's track record is better than most. Remake shipped with a disc on PS4, Rebirth did the same on PS5, and a PS5 bundle of both came with three of them. Rebirth is also on the short list of PS5 releases that shipped across more than one disc, a sign of how much data Square Enix has been willing to press. The publisher could close the set later with a complete physical edition of all three games, which would not help anyone who wants Revelation in a box on launch day.

Rockstar has already shown the other outcome. GTA 6 will be released with a code in the box and no disc, and Rockstar is shipping those boxes on November 12, a week before the game's November 19 launch, so buyers can redeem the code and preload alongside digital preorders. Preloading opens the same day.

The size of the game explains part of that. A PS5 triple-layer Blu-ray holds up to 100GB, Xbox Series X discs top out at 50GB, and multi-disc console releases stay rare: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the Complete Edition of Horizon Forbidden West, and Baldur's Gate 3, which needs four discs on Xbox. GTA 6 is expected to run past 200GB, which would mean at least three discs on PS5 and as many as five on Xbox Series X.

Physical sales are also thinning out on their own. They are close to negligible on Xbox. On PlayStation they still account for around 30% of sales, and for a game the size of GTA 6 that share would likely run higher.

Sony cited downloads at about 78 percent of 2025 game sales when it announced the cutoff, and it keeps roughly 65 percent of a physical game's price after retail and manufacturing, against close to the full price on a digital sale. Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has said Sony weighed dropping discs during his tenure, with digital already at 95 percent of revenue. Discs won't disappear immediately, though. Sony has told partners that publishers can keep ordering disc runs and that the transition happens in stages, with retail boxes holding a digital code instead of a disc once it completes.

Players have not accepted the terms quietly. The Change.org petition against the plan crossed 250,000 gamers in July and now sits above 345,000 signatures. A group of PlayStation community creators has called for #PSBlackout, asking players to stay off PlayStation Network and skip PS5 purchases from August 23 through August 30. French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon backed the petition and moved the argument onto political ground.

"Videogames are not mere merchandise, they are cultural assets."

— Jean-Luc Mélenchon

I think the license question is the only part of this shift worth fighting over, and it is the part that will pass most buyers without a fight, one purchase at a time, until access is the only thing anyone is buying.

A code in a box satisfies the shelf and the autograph and solves nothing about ownership or preservation, which is the objection driving the petition rather than nostalgia for plastic. A code redeems once, ties the game to an account, and leaves the buyer holding cardboard.

A PlayStation Network outage on July 24 locked players out of their accounts and blocked games they had already downloaded. An Xbox outage did the same thing three days later, cutting off sign-ins and blanking libraries, including disc-based and backward-compatible titles. Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet said a licensing service outside Xbox's systems had failed, breaking the checks that confirm what a player is allowed to launch.

Analysts still expect Sony to absorb the anger. Kantan Games consultant Serkan Toto has pointed to more than 120 million active PlayStation users and roughly 50 million PlayStation Plus subscribers as reason enough to expect cancellations to barely register. EU consumer protection commissioner Michael McGrath said the bloc lacks legal grounds to force Sony to keep selling discs, calling distribution a matter of commercial freedom.

Read also: Sandfall Interactive's leads called Sony's disc exit a sad decision, with CEO Guillaume Broche pointing to the shelf of owned games rather than to sales numbers. That piece also covers Jean-Luc Mélenchon backing the Change.org petition past 345,000 signatures, the #PSBlackout week planned for August 23 through 30, and the PlayStation Network outage that locked players out of games they had already downloaded.