Sony Remade Its Famous PS4 Disc-Sharing Bit, Minus the Disc

Thirteen years ago, two Sony guys held up a PS4 disc, passed it to each other, and made Microsoft look like it was trying to sell you a leash. That 22-second clip won Sony an E3. This week, at Tokyo Game Show, Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes got back together and did the bit again, and the punchline this time is that there's nothing in their hands.

Yoshida posted the recreation himself, and it's a cute reunion. Boyes left Sony back in 2016. Yoshida says he got "fired" from his president role in 2019 and finally walked away from the company's Independent Developer Initiative in 2025. Neither of them works there anymore, which might be why they can joke about this and the rest of us can't quite laugh along.

Here's the actual joke, translated: Sony announced months ago that it's ending disc production entirely. The company's math is simple. Most people already buy digital, so why keep paying for plastic, printing, and shelf space when the PlayStation Store can just take a bigger cut and skip the retailer. Great for Sony's spreadsheet. Less great for anyone who liked lending a friend a game, trading it in, or owning a physical object that still works when a server doesn't.

And that's before you get to what you're actually buying on that store, which is a license, not a copy of the game. Sony is currently in a class-action lawsuit arguing, with a straight face, that it's "not plausible" for customers to have thought they owned their digital purchases. Sit with that one. The company that made its name mocking another company's restrictive DRM is now in court explaining why you never owned the thing you paid full price for. No refunds on the store either, and none of the flexibility a place like Steam has trained people to expect.

Microsoft, for what it's worth, gets a rare good mention here: its disc-to-digital program lets Xbox owners unlock digital licenses for physical games they already own, though plenty of publishers haven't bothered signing up. It's not a perfect system. It's at least a system that admits discs still matter to somebody.

So yeah, funny video, as GameSpot noted when it caught the reunion. Nice callback, good sport from two guys who don't have to defend the current strategy anymore. The people still working there do, and a meme about sharing games doesn't mean much once the thing being shared has been quietly removed from the shelf.