Sony has released its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2026, a period during which some PS5 fans have taken a stand against PlayStation decisions in recent years to voice their frustrations.
After years of disappointment over Sony’s first-party game production, studio closures, and the move to live service, it all collided with PlayStation’s decision to stop making physical versions of new titles starting in January 2028.
Fans and organizations have held protests to try to make their voices heard, such as the No Disc, No Buy slogan and, most famously, Does It Play’s PS5 outage rally. The latter encouraged fans to turn off their PS5 consoles for a week to try to hit Sony where it hurts: its financial results, particularly where Sony reports its monthly active users by quarter.
These figures have now been made public and confirm that the protests did not affect Sony’s results.
For the second quarter period in which the protests took place, Sony recorded 127 million monthly active users. This represents eight million more users than last year over the same period, and an increase of two million compared to the first quarter of 2026.
There was a 7% increase in monthly active users in September compared to the same month last fiscal year, resulting in an all-time high for September. Total play time for the entire quarter increased 4% year-over-year, with Sony seeing its PlayStation engagement “steadily improving.”
On the other hand, the No Disc, No Buy campaign is designed to tell Sony that if a game doesn’t come on a physical disc, that person won’t buy it. During this period, 78% of all “full game software” purchases were for the digital version. These are “full game” purchases only; the percentage does not include DLC or microtransactions.
This represents an increase of 6% compared to the same period last year.
Customer spending on physical and digital software is actually up for both media types, but digital continues to outperform physical. Sony earned 43.1 billion yen in the second quarter of this fiscal year from physical games, almost 8 billion yen more than the same period last year.
However, digital games brought in 330.8 billion yen. This represents an increase of 60.5 billion yen compared to the second quarter of fiscal 2025.
The real impact of this type of campaign has always been the subject of debate. It’s likely that Sony was aware of these events, but if they have no tangible impact, then it’s something the company can very easily sweep under the rug. It also emerged that almost half of the social media accounts promoting the No Disc, No Buy campaign may have been fake bots.
PlayStation has never commented on the fan protests and has not shared any updates or changes to its plans to stop physical disc production starting in early 2028. With this evidence now at hand, it likely sees fit to continue what it’s doing.
During the same period that these fan protests took place, the number of monthly active users and the ratio of digital-to-physical software sales both increased. How do you react to the news? Post your thoughts in the comments below.
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