Hideki Kamiya’s position on physical games is more practical than nostalgic. The Devil May Cry and Bayonetta co-creator says he now purchases every game digitally and sees the broad move away from discs as an unsurprising result of where the business has been heading. But he is far less interested in treating the physical-versus-digital argument as the finish line.
For Kamiya, the larger issue is whether the companies that control game rights will make sure their work remains obtainable and playable years from now. A disc can be useful, a download can be convenient, and both formats come with limitations. What matters most, he argues, is that games do not simply vanish when hardware generations, storefront policies, licenses, or corporate priorities change.
“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.”
That is a refreshingly direct way to frame a debate that often turns into a format war. Players understandably value discs because they can be lent, traded, displayed, and sometimes used without depending on an account or a live storefront. Digital buyers value immediate access, sales, convenience, and not having to find a tiny plastic box that has apparently moved behind the sofa to begin a new life. Neither preference automatically solves preservation.
A physical copy may remain in a collection, but it can still rely on a console, a working optical drive, patches, downloadable content, server checks, and compatible display equipment. A digital purchase may be easy to install today, but a delisting, a closed store, an expired license, or a platform transition can make its future much less clear. Preservation is not a synonym for owning a shelf, nor is it guaranteed by having a library icon on a modern dashboard.
Kamiya sees the direction of travel
Kamiya said he does not buy physical games anymore, describing his own purchases as entirely digital. He also said that ending physical distribution looked like the direction the industry was already moving toward. That does not make the change painless for collectors or players who prefer tangible media, but it does acknowledge the commercial reality: publishers increasingly favor systems that reduce manufacturing and distribution complexity while keeping players inside account-based ecosystems.
Reported plans to phase out PlayStation game discs in 2028 have sharpened the concern, particularly alongside the familiar reminder that a digital transaction may grant a license to access software rather than ownership in the old-fashioned, keep-it-forever sense. That distinction is easy to overlook while a storefront is healthy and a console is current. It becomes extremely important when a game is delisted, a service changes, or a piece of aging hardware finally decides it has processed its final loading screen.
Kamiya’s concern is not really that people must choose plastic over downloads. It is that rights holders should accept responsibility for keeping their catalogues available to future audiences. This includes games that remain commercially useful, but it also includes titles whose immediate sales potential has long since faded. The latter group is often where the cultural loss becomes most visible.
Older games already show the problem
Many classic games cannot be played on modern hardware at all. Compatibility has improved in some places through remasters, subscription libraries, compilations, emulation efforts, and backward-compatible systems, but it remains uneven. A celebrated series may receive repeated reissues while another is stranded on a specific console, attached to a defunct service, or caught in licensing knots that nobody appears eager to untangle.
The result is a strange gap in the history of the medium. Films, books, and albums can certainly become difficult to obtain, but games are unusually bound to shifting technology. They can require particular controllers, operating systems, online connections, screen standards, peripheral hardware, regional releases, or server infrastructure. Even when an old game disc survives in perfect condition, the rest of the chain needed to play it may not.
Collectors have spent decades quietly compensating for this situation. They preserve cartridges and discs, retain original consoles, archive manuals, seek replacement parts, and learn the sometimes bewildering logic of video connections. Keeping a collection usable is its own discipline; storing retro games so they can be found and played is as important as arranging them attractively. Yet private collecting cannot be the only preservation plan for an art form with a global audience.
It also should not be mistaken for a universal solution. Original hardware becomes expensive, repairs require specialist knowledge, and access to older games can become a luxury. A future player should not need to win an auction, restore a 30-year-old machine, and negotiate the mysteries of analogue video just to experience a historically significant release.
Availability is also a cultural question
Kamiya specifically connected accessibility to game culture, not merely gameplay. That distinction matters. Old games teach players where genres came from, how design conventions changed, what technical constraints inspired, and why certain creators or franchises became influential. They provide context for new releases, remakes, sequels, and every argument that begins with the phrase “you had to be there.”
They also preserve social history. Local multiplayer games reveal how friends once shared a television and a limited number of controllers. Arcade games reflect the spaces in which people played. Early online titles show how communities formed around systems that could feel crude by current standards. For a reminder of why the social side of older design still resonates, the unwritten rules of couch multiplayer capture the small negotiations that a game’s software alone cannot fully document.
Preservation therefore requires more than backing up executable files. A complete effort may involve manuals, packaging, patches, regional versions, development history, online features, controller layouts, and knowledge of how a game was meant to function. Not every element can be carried forward perfectly, especially for titles built around discontinued online services. Still, making a good-faith attempt is different from allowing works to disappear because no department can justify the paperwork.
What responsibility could look like
Kamiya did not present a single technical or legal blueprint, and there is no simple one. Rights can be split between publishers, developers, music owners, actors, platform holders, and other partners. Re-releases cost money. Old code can be difficult to adapt. In some cases, online dependencies make an exact recreation impossible. Those are real obstacles, not magic words that excuse inaction.
Still, rights holders have options that fall between “sell a pristine remake” and “leave it inaccessible forever.” They can pursue backward compatibility where feasible, commission faithful ports, release curated collections, support archival institutions, document server-dependent features, preserve patches, and provide clear notice before delisting a title. They can also make decisions early in development that reduce unnecessary dependence on services likely to disappear.
Most importantly, companies can treat access to their back catalogues as stewardship rather than a temporary promotional lever. A classic should not need a new sequel, a television adaptation, or a quarterly sales opportunity before it is deemed worthy of returning. Sometimes the valuable act is simply allowing people to buy and play the game.
Physical media remains useful, but not sufficient
There is no need to pretend physical releases are meaningless. They provide a degree of independence from storefronts, retain resale and lending value, and give collectors an object tied to the game’s original era. For many people, a box on a shelf is also a better reminder of what they own than a tile nested three menus deep in a digital library.
But Kamiya’s point resists an easy romantic answer. A disc-only future would still leave countless games out of print, hardware-dependent, region-locked, incomplete without updates, or difficult to run on current displays. Anyone using older consoles today knows that preservation can become a technical project quickly; before buying extra equipment, it helps to map a retro console’s connections before choosing an HDMI adapter.
The better goal is durable availability across formats and generations. Players should be able to keep collecting physical editions if they choose, while digital editions should be sold and maintained with clearer expectations. Neither route should be built on the assumption that a game’s history has an expiration date.
Kamiya’s argument is ultimately modest: format is secondary to continuity. As more games become digital-first and more older titles fall outside modern platform support, that principle becomes harder to dismiss. The industry does not need every game to remain perpetually profitable. It does need the people who control game history to recognize that access to it is worth preserving.
