UPDATE 9/1: Zelnick’s bet held, as the no-disc backlash never showed up in the sales numbers — Newzoo now estimates $4.5 billion by launch week, and the leaker who made digital pre-orders his cause reportedly cashed out roughly $270,000 in crypto before Rockstar’s Netflix reveal.
UPDATE: Zelnick’s dismissal of physical ownership concerns has an escalating answer, as a leaker group has weaponized the digital ownership fight against Rockstar by leaking alleged GTA 6 footage with a manifesto demanding an end to digital pre-orders.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was handed a golden opportunity on Thursday’s earnings call.
An investor asked him point blank about Sony’s decision to kill PlayStation disc production in 2028, the most controversial move the industry has made all year.
He could have defended physical ownership. Instead, he shrugged at the entire concept of the disc.
“Who Cares If You Download Digitally?”
“I’m not going to comment on Sony’s own decision,” Zelnick said, before making his own company’s position perfectly clear. Take-Two’s business is “well over 90 percent digitally distributed,” he explained, and for big games specifically, discs “don’t really make sense for the consumer.”
He went further. Since most games require online registration to play anyway, Zelnick argued, “who cares if you download digitally?” In his telling, it’s all the same, and downloading is simply more convenient.
That’s the fullest defense yet of the decision to ship GTA 6’s $80 “physical” edition as a download code in a box, and it lands the same day Take-Two revealed pre-orders have vastly beaten its own internal forecasts. From where Zelnick sits, the market has already voted.
Discs Are Vinyl Now, But the Door Isn’t Closed
Zelnick compared physical game releases to vinyl records: a niche collectible format for enthusiasts, not a mainstream way of distributing anything. Coming from the man publishing the biggest game of the decade, that’s less a prediction than a policy statement.
And yet, he left one door open.
Asked by IGN whether a disc version of GTA 6 could ever materialize down the line, Zelnick declined to rule it out.
That’s the first on-record acknowledgment that a proper physical release could still happen, months after unverified reports claimed a disc edition might follow the launch.
Nothing is confirmed, but “not ruling it out” from the CEO carries more weight than any support-email screenshot.
“For the Consumer” Is Doing a Lot of Work
Here’s where the framing deserves a second look.
Zelnick says discs no longer make sense “for the consumer,” and on pure convenience, he’s mostly right. Downloads are easier, and over 90 percent of buyers already choose them.
But convenience was never what the disc argument was about. A disc can be resold, lent to a friend, played offline forever, and preserved long after a storefront shuts down.
A license can be revoked, delisted, or stranded when the servers go dark. None of that made it into the answer, and “who cares if you download digitally” only works as a question if you never ask who controls the download afterward.
The most telling exchange came in a separate interview with The Game Business, which pointed out that retail has always been a key marketing channel for GTA.
Zelnick called that “a good point” and said it’s exactly why the code-in-a-box edition exists. Read that back: the box survives because it’s advertising on a shelf. The disc inside it died because it’s a cost. The consumer benefit is the part that got edited out.
Not everyone is going along quietly, either.
Some physical-media retailers have already dropped GTA 6 from sale entirely rather than stock a box with no disc, and the fan backlash that greeted the no-disc reveal hasn’t faded so much as found new targets, most recently the six-hour Netflix exclusivity window on the Extended Look.
None of it is likely to matter to the bottom line, and Zelnick knows it.
GTA 6 arrives November 19, discless, at $80, with record pre-orders. The era of the disc isn’t being debated anymore. It’s being priced out, one “who cares” at a time.
UPDATE 8/11: Not everyone is shrugging: Stop Killing Games is now backing the €435 million PlayStation monopoly lawsuit in the Netherlands.
