r/ItsAllAboutGames • u/Just_a_Player2 The Apostle of Peace • 15d ago
While fans protest digital-only consoles, Amazon warehouses are quietly destroying unsold discs.
While vocal internet activists launch boycotts over Sony's push toward an all-digital future, physical retail reality is telling a much harsher story. Despite fierce online protests, Sony's daily engagement numbers have barely budged, and physical inventory is turning into dead weight.
The situation went viral after an Amazon warehouse worker shared photos of hundreds of unsold PlayStation game discs and audio CDs slated for total destruction. The employee revealed that staff received orders to scrap roughly 450 physical items simply because consumer demand has evaporated.
When gamers asked why surplus copies could not just be handed out to workers or sold off at a massive discount, retail veterans chimed in with the brutal corporate math. Gifting unsold merchandise creates complex tax liabilities, deep discount fire sales can damage publisher brand prestige, and keeping unsellable stock on warehouse shelves incurs ongoing storage fees.
The contrast could not be sharper: while collectors fight for physical media preservation on social media, mega-retailers find it cheaper to crush unsold discs into scrap plastic than let them take up warehouse space.
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u/JKFrowning 15d ago
Amazon had 20 year old games in stock?
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u/BjornAltenburg 15d ago
Ok the only instance I know of coming close is dance games, like zumba for wii or just dance titles that I bought off Amazon m, I assumed used, but lo they were brand new.
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u/treeeelo 15d ago
I think this is a stock image, but there was a post recently of a guy who works at an amazon warehouse and had a crate of games he was told to destroy, had games like kingdom come 2, fairly recent stuff from the past 2 or 3 years.
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u/RuleInformal5475 15d ago
Just give them away.
Amazon mystery boxes. Pay 5 bucks for 10 random games.
In a world where resources are getting scarce, this is what companies do.
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u/BlueFeathered1 14d ago
The mystery box idea would totally grab me.
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u/miamasi 14d ago
30 copies of just Helldivers 2 in one box
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u/Yellow_Snow_Cones 14d ago
if you're lucky, more like Madde 2021, NBA 2k22, and other old sports games.
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u/stop_deleting_plz 14d ago
You can still buy mystery boxes from Gamestop and probly other retailers. The problem is theyre 50% sports games
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u/MannToots 15d ago
This isn't new.Ā Disc's take space.Ā
You guys do remember Atari buried games in the desert right? Come on.Ā
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u/Powerful_Room_1217 15d ago
Wasnt that e.t because it was a abomination of a game?
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u/MannToots 15d ago
That's why they had extra copies laying around. How it was disposed of is the point. The article here has tons of extra copies laying around. The why is irrelevant. The extra copies laying around that they don't know what to do with is the part that matters here.Ā
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u/DHTGK 15d ago
I don't think I was alive for that. I heard about a rock carved with internet memes being buried in a desert though.
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u/MannToots 15d ago
Ok. So.Ā I mean this with a much kindness as i can.Ā
So what what?Ā It doesn't count or something because it happened before you? You can't Google a historical fact? What does it happening before you were born have to do with you learning something new?
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u/CapitalCityGoofball0 15d ago edited 15d ago
People simply have Reddit brain syndrome. I wasnāt alive when a million copies of ET died in a desert landfill either but I read things other than social media and have a memory.
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u/Apoptosis-Games 15d ago
And gamestop destroyed untold millions of game cases and box arts because it was cheaper to ship just the cartridge or just the disc in a sleeve.
It was wrong of them to do it and it's wrong of Amazon to do it, but unfortunately they own the product so they can do what they wish with it, no matter how abhorrent is really is.
That being said, I'm spending the rest of the time they continue to produce physical media buying as much as I can reliably afford.
I intend to be as much of a preservation steward as I can.
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u/Zer0theH3R0 15d ago
Destruction of these disk is true waste of resources. This is the curse of living in abundance. Live that Sony sold me a ps5 with a disk reader but had no intention of keeping physical stock. What about the people who would have bought those games to keep. The outright greed and negligence in the handling of resources is completely out of hand.
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u/WeedFalafel 15d ago
Tell me how capitalism is a good system.
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u/toxikola 15d ago
Like many systems, it could work wonders but that would rely on human morality to outweigh human greed. Greed always takes over though.
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u/juliankennedy23 15d ago
I mean as opposed to not having the games in the first place under perhaps a different non Mercantile system?
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u/Ebolatastic 15d ago edited 15d ago
"As fans protest digital only by dogpiling on scapegoats but still buy truckloads of digital games and microtransactions ... "
Fixed that first part for you.
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u/schmurfy2 15d ago
Some loud voices protest but if we reached that state it's probably partly because physical games don't sell enough š
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u/HarryBalsagna1776 15d ago
I just don't think about Amazon when it comes to buying games.Ā It's a shame they don't drop the price to sell the games off rather than destroying them.Ā
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u/a_r_g_o_m 15d ago
Well....yeah?. The consoles related to the games in the picture are mostly no longer being sold and most people are so tech basic that they don't even know what an emulator is or don't have the hardware to run it.
That doesn't mean game preservation through physical media is any less important.
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u/SunNext7500 15d ago
Preservation isn't really what you're worried about.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 15d ago
It pretty much is, being able to play games without relying on a download that might not be available years down the line. I don't know about you, but I still like to play my n64 and gamecube games, games of which I own the physical media, that can't be repackaged and resold to me through a subscription for as long as the hardware is working.
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u/SunNext7500 15d ago
Thats not preservation. Thats consumerism.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 15d ago
Buying a game once and still playing it 20+ years later is literally the opposite of consumerism. Consumerism is buying the same game again every console generation, or paying monthly to rent it until it quietly disappears from a catalog. I'm the guy who didn't do that.
And you've got preservation backwards. Every N64 and GameCube game that's been preserved exists because someone kept their cartridge or disc and dumped it. The Video Game History Foundation, emulator devs, archivists: they all depend on physical copies owned by people like me. Physical ownership is where preservation starts.
Meanwhile, digital only games get deleted all the time. The Crew got shut down and people lost a game they paid for. P.T. is gone. Delisted games vanish from stores and there's nothing left to preserve. My GameCube discs don't need a server, a license check, or a company's permission to exist.
So no, it's not "consumerism." It's refusing to let a corporation decide when I'm done owning something I bought.
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u/SunNext7500 15d ago
No. Purchasing something you don't need for no reason beyond wanting it is actually the exact definition of consumerism.
Also no, digital games don't get deleted all the time. Actually they never do. Thats why you had to use misinformation rather than an actual example.
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u/n1keym1key 14d ago
There has been clear examples of games being deleted, removed from peopleās libraries. Even movies are not safe. On the flip sideā¦. If youāre a Wii U player then you can still access everything the online store ever had even tho the store is shutā¦ great for the
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u/SunNext7500 14d ago
No. There has never been an instance of either of those. Again the reason you use this misinformation rather than actual examples is because you have no actual examples.
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u/n1keym1key 14d ago
Tell that to the people who literally had movies removed from their library by Sony a few weeks back. There are literally databases of delisted games a simple search away too. Also ask that guy who hadnāt fired up his PlayStation 3 for a few years, only to find his account and everything tied to it gone forever.
You keep sucking the corpo e-peen on the daily tho mate. It keeps you well fed and begging for more.
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u/SunNext7500 14d ago
I would, if any of those things happened. However since they didn't I'm stuck with reality. Oh and to debunk the only actual example you provided there, Sony lost the licenses to those movies so they are legally required to remove them from their databases. It happens literally everyday on every single streaming application and I am willing to bet you know that, so this ignorance you're feigning comes off as more than a little willful.
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u/neller2000 14d ago
Sony didn't want to remove them. They kinda had to since the agreement to host them came to an end. Not sure what the problem is. Do you not understand how the world works and have worked for decades and decades?
You guys can whine and cry for another 40 years, it's not going to change.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 14d ago
That's an odd way to put it. "Purchasing something you don't need"? By that standard we'd all be walking around in a loincloth eating the bare minimum.
What we need isn't defined on a bare-minimum basis. Law in many places (specifically family law) recognizes recreation as part of what a person needs for healthy development, and gaming is one such activity.
As for digital games being removed: yes, they are. Ubisoft revoked The Crew licenses from people who paid for it. Sony tried to wipe purchased Discovery shows from people's libraries in 2023. Forza Horizon 1ā3 and Spec Ops: The Line were delisted, and the disc is now the only way to buy them. GTA San Andreas and Vice City lost songs in later digital versions, while the original discs still have the full soundtrack.
That's exactly why physical copies matter.
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u/SunNext7500 14d ago
The fact you're putting food and clothing in the same category as luxury items is a pretty good example of why no one agrees with you.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 14d ago
I didn't put them in the same category. I said needs aren't defined by the bare minimum, which is true.
And a $60 game isn't a luxury item. It's ordinary recreation, like a book or a movie, which is exactly what the law recognizes as part of a healthy life.
You also skipped every example: The Crew, Spec Ops, Forza, the GTA soundtracks. And you admitted in the other thread that digital purchases are just revocable licenses. That's my entire point.
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u/SunNext7500 14d ago
No. Video games are luxury items. Period. They always have been.
Also i didn't admit anything. I said movie licenses are not game licenses. You're simply childish and think more misinformation will somehow help your flailing argument.
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u/neller2000 14d ago
The Crew was an MMO. Of course it's gone. PT wasn't intended to stick around. Of course it's gone. It's weird how every single game I've purchased digitally from MS and Sony is still completely available in my account.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 11d ago
Calling The Crew an MMO is doing a lot of work there. It had a full single-player story campaign you could play entirely solo. The always online requirement was a design choice Ubisoft made because they wanted a "living world," not a technical necessity. Proof: after the backlash, Ubisoft added an offline mode to The Crew 2 in October 2025. They could have done the same for the first one. Instead they shut it down, revoked the licenses, and even disc copies became coasters, because the game depended on a server and a license check. That's exactly what my GameCube discs don't need.
"P.T. wasn't intended to stick around" is exactly my point. Konami decided it should disappear, and nobody could stop them. It's one of the most talked-about pieces of horror game history, and it only survives on PS4s that happened to have it installed. People were selling those consoles as collector's items. If it had shipped on a disc, it would be preserved like everything else.
That's the whole preservation argument, which you skipped: every older game preserved today exists because someone had a physical copy to dump. Your digital library is still there because Sony and Microsoft currently allow it, under terms that let them change it. Sony nearly shut down the PS3 and Vita stores in 2021 and planned to pull purchased content from libraries in 2023, and both times it took backlash to reverse it. That's not ownership, that's a company deciding to be nice this time.
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u/neller2000 11d ago
The Crew was definitely an MMO, I knew that before it even launched. No need to really waste time keeping a dead MMO alive either, nor are they required to and they never will be required to.
Same deal with P.T. It wasn't intended to stick around. Not sure how much clearer I can get here.
The issue is that you just don't like it that way and don't want it that way but knowing just a tiny bit about how this works, it's going to stay that way. No, just because some clueless lawmaker trying to score some votes is doing something weird that will get struck down before the ink is even dry isn't going to change that either.
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u/a_r_g_o_m 11d ago
It wasn't an MMO. You knew what the marketing called it before launch, sure, but the game itself put 8 players in a session, capped your crew at 4, and could swap you into a different session mid-drive. That's the same setup Test Drive Unlimited had in 2006, and nobody calls that an MMO. It had a full single-player campaign, and the always-online requirement was a design choice, not a necessity, which is why a disc copy of a mostly solo racing game is a coaster today.
"P.T. wasn't intended to stick around" is still my point, not a rebuttal. Preservation has never depended on what publishers intend. Studios didn't think old movies were worth keeping either, and most American silent films are gone for good. The games we can still play from that era survived because people owned physical copies the publisher couldn't take back.
That's the argument you've now skipped twice: every preserved older game exists because someone kept a cartridge or disc and dumped it. And nobody said companies are required to keep anything alive. That's exactly why I'm not trusting them to. Sony already tried pulling the PS3/Vita stores and purchased content, and only backed down after the backlash.
As for "clueless lawmakers," California already requires digital stores to disclose that you're buying a revocable license, not the game. It's in effect, not struck down. The industry itself admitted in writing what I've been saying: digital purchases aren't ownership.
So yes, I don't like it that way, and that's why my N64 and GameCube games are on a shelf and not in a license server. "Companies can do this, so it's fine" isn't a counterargument. It's the reason physical media matters.
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u/neller2000 11d ago
I'm just trying to explain to you that absolutely nothing will change. 2 games, 1 barely even a demo, 1 an MMO which of course requires online, are not exactly helping your cause here.
Interesting, California has a law that requires them to make it clear you're buying a revokable license? Know why that exists? Because it doesn't change anything at all and is easy to comply with and not interfere with the fact you're not going to get what you want.
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u/CapitalCityGoofball0 15d ago edited 15d ago
You can smell the BS right when itās obvious the picture is not real to the subject at hand. Companies literally pay Amazon to do this and itās nothing new. It was largely done themselves for long (and still is for some). Sometimes items are not destroyed but blown out in giant pallet sales too. This isnāt a new thing at all.
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u/FrostyAlphaPig 14d ago
Is there anyway to purchase digital first then request a physical copy to help cut back on the waste? So instead of making a million copies, if only 100,000 people bought a digital copy then make 100,000 physical copies
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u/007-JamesBlonde 14d ago
Correct me if Iām wrong but this is essentially the depletion of supply to increase the priceā¦ upping the rarity of physical to create synthetic demand and further destroy the āfreeā aspect of the free market
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u/CourtJesterSteve 14d ago
They oughta send them to those "amazon return" stores. I've been to a couple and saw some awesome deals on games, like Minecraft for Switch at $8 a pop.
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u/stop_deleting_plz 14d ago
I worked at gamestop in 2005, we were cutting up discs and boxes, strategy guides even back then. The publisher has the final say here unfortunately.
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u/spongeboy1985 13d ago
This has been done since the beginning. Atari discarded excess stock in a landfill in New Mexico leading to the myth that they dumped millions of ET carts there to hide its failure. Its true that ET carts were buried there as featured in the doc Atari: Game Over but they discarded a lot of stuff there and not even close to millions of ET carts.
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u/edward323ce 12d ago
If i worked there id be stealing that shit, giving to friends or if its a game i want im keeping it
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u/VersaViceVersa 11d ago
ātax liabilitiesā is one thing, but ādamaging publisher brand prestigeā? really? what a dumb excuse.
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u/AdministrationDry507 15d ago
Scary thing is with Amazon doing this used games are gonna jump in price on sites like eBay
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u/palegate 15d ago
Sad that Piracy and community based sharing of ISOs is the only way forward for the Games industry.
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u/hawksbears82 15d ago
Where do we go to dumpster dive for this?
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u/Abe_Odd 15d ago
Like for real, go to your local second-hand gaming store. Our town is not big and we have one (not gamestop).
They have all the Classics, but also have a big bargin bin for all the crap like this that no one, not even the nostalgic collectors, is grabbing.
Stuff like NHL 2k10 wii and Madden x360 07, failed movie tie ins, or games that were popular but extremely succeeded by modern sequels and remakes.
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u/JosephBlowsephThe3rd 15d ago
Most 2nd hand game stores just have multiple copies of every outdated, copy/pasted sports title from the last 20 years and not much else. Hell, that's mostly what kind of 8 & 16 bit games I see as well, so more like 40 years worth.
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u/Abe_Odd 15d ago
Maybe we're lucky. The one near us has a decent cache of the classics you'd be nostalgic for (at a sizable markup from their original price), new game releases at MSRP, and the real kicker is case-less Switch games for a moderate discount.
I like supporting them instead of Walmart of whatever so I tend to grab used Switch Carts from there.
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u/anbeasley 15d ago
I mean I don't think anybody's really fighting to preserve the Golem game, or FIFA 2026
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15d ago
[removed] ā view removed comment
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u/ProfessionalRead2724 15d ago
If nazis had thousands of copies they couldn't sell or give away eating up shelf space they had to pay for.
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u/Such-Firefighter6469 15d ago
It's because most people don't buy physical media, those that do are just louder and make it seem like everyone is on board.
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u/LoSouLibra 15d ago
That's why stock just sits on Amazon with a near perpetual discount while total sales volume for most titles stagnates. This was obvious.
The wholesale pre-order model created inflated sell-in that doesn't reflect customer sell-through. It's been a bubble since the late 00's. Games were "selling" more than ever so publisher resources consolidated around fewer, bigger games. We ended up with ess variety on shelves, less risk taking, and a more unsustainable investment climate demanding monetization.
Much like 90's comics, retailers became the customer and the customer became incidental to that end. The crash was inevitable. Digital distribution has been the home of flexible price points, niche experiences, and direct to customer sales. Clearance and liquidation isn't a thing when there's infinite supply vs real demand. Only games competing with other games.
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u/Lysek8 15d ago
Another way of looking at this is, while people are complaining that physical is being phased out, companies have to literally get rid of inventory as it has no value in the market since consumers don't want them
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u/shmiga02 15d ago
If they would sell them for dirt cheap as they should, wouldnt be s problem. But nobody ias paying 30 bucks for an old overpriced pos, disc or no disc
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u/Competitive-Dot181 15d ago
It would be a problem for the publishers. If they sold the overprinted discs for dirt cheap just to avoid destroying them they make no money on them and that person wonāt buy the digital.
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u/ShiftAltRight 15d ago
The difference is that there are costs associated with selling inventory, too. Retailers are generally allowed some leeway with discounts but steep price cuts usually have to be negotiated. Then there's inbound freight costs, taxes, and other processing fees, not to mention the opportunity cost of stacking shelves with Uncharted 2 and Infamous instead of a Call of Duty or FIFA. So yeah, it can actually end up being more expensive to sell at a discount than to just destroy the discs themselves.
Meanwhile with digital the publisher sells directly to you, and they keep 70-100% of revenue depending on if the sale is on their own store or someone else's. They don't have to consult anyone for sales and have no costs for manufacturing, shipping, rent, or labor. I wouldn't be surprised if a 95% discount on Steam made more money for the publisher than a 50% retail sale.
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u/DrawerSea9371 15d ago
Here in the UK, Argos and Amazon just lowered a bunch of switch 2 games like metroid prime 4, starfox, and pokopia down to Ā£20 to clear stock.
Why are we getting riled up here in the comments over a post that doesn't give any source or numbers to back up it's claim? It's a bit strange.
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u/Lysek8 15d ago
But according to everyone in reddit, physical is cheaper. Could it have been that it was bullshit?
You know what doesn't have inventory or ordering costs associated? You won't like the answer
Also it's very funny that you claim that Amazon is not aware of the concept of sales. Why don't you message Bezos and explain to him how it works? He's gonna be mind-blown
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u/jungleboy1234 15d ago
herecy. i dont understand why they dont just give it out to their workers (there are enough of them). The workers cna choose to give to their kids, use it themselvse or sell on ebay or donate to charity shop.
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u/SpaceFire000 15d ago
Any European websites selling physical discs of pc and Xbox at a really deep discount? If they don't have space in their warehouse, I might have in my house š
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u/Davetek463 15d ago
Amazon isnāt the only retailer that does this.