SONY CUTS IT'S DISCS OFF

One can only marvel at the serene efficiency with which Sony has chosen to euthanise the last lingering pretence that a PlayStation owner actually owns anything. From January 2028, new games will arrive not as reassuringly solid discs—those charming plastic coasters of yesteryear—but as pure, weightless digital grace notes delivered straight into the maw of your console. The company calls this adaptation to consumer trends. One might more accurately call it the final, courteous eviction notice served on the very idea of private property in the realm of entertainment.

The announcement itself was a masterpiece of corporate minimalism: a quiet blog post, the textual equivalent of a soft cough in a boardroom. No trumpets, no confessions, just the calm statement that physical production will cease and that the future belongs to the PlayStation Store. One pictures the executives nodding sagely over their oat-milk lattes, congratulating themselves on having read the runes of the market. The runes, of course, say that most people already prefer digital downloads. This is rather like observing that most people already accept being herded into airport security queues and concluding that the logical next step is to abolish homes altogether and issue everyone with a sleeping pod at the terminal.

Let us be clear about what is being lost. A physical disc was never merely a delivery mechanism. It was a small, durable monument to the transaction. You bought it, you owned it, you could lend it to your dubious mate with the dodgy taste in shooters, sell it when your interest waned, or display it on a shelf like a retired athlete showing off his medals. The second-hand market, that great democratising bazaar, allowed the impecunious teenager in Bolton to play the same blockbuster as the trust-fund hipster in Shoreditch, albeit six months later and at half the price. Sony’s move does not merely inconvenience collectors; it abolishes the very concept of circulation. The game becomes a revocable privilege, a digital tenant whose lease the landlord may terminate whenever the servers feel peckish.

One is reminded of the music industry’s earlier, equally pious march into the streaming abyss. Once upon a time you owned your records. Now you rent access to a library that might vanish if the licensing agreements shift, the company is acquired by a private equity firm with a cough, or someone important decides that a particular artist has committed wrongthink. The film studios followed suit, turning your expensive 4K television into a polite suggestion box that occasionally forgets you ever paid for The Godfather. Gaming, that last redoubt of the enthusiast who liked to touch his possessions, is now being frog-marched down the same corridor. The water has been warming so gradually that many players have mistaken the sensation for a particularly luxurious spa treatment.

The sardonic beauty of the arrangement is that Sony can maintain the pretence of benevolence. “We are aligning with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” they murmur, as though the community had been consulted in anything resembling a binding referendum. In reality, the preference for digital has been gently cultivated through years of smaller inconveniences: longer load times for discs, exclusive bonuses for downloads, the creeping knowledge that a physical copy might still require a day-one patch the size of a minor Soviet novel. It is the classic technique of the courteous monopolist: make the old way slightly more irritating until the new way feels like liberation. The customer does not so much choose as discover that the alternative has quietly been discontinued.

The deeper comedy lies in the transformation of the gamer from proprietor to tenant. You will pay the full price—often a robust seventy or eighty pounds—for what is essentially a long-term lease on electrons. Should Sony decide, in a fit of righteousness or server-maintenance enthusiasm, to delist a title, your purchase evaporates with the serene finality of a deleted tweet. The small print, that unread epic of our age, has always insisted that you were buying a licence rather than the game itself, but physical media at least gave the lie a comforting solidity. Now the pretence can be dropped. You own nothing, and you will be expected to look grateful for the privilege of paying handsomely for the experience.

Nor should we ignore the quiet euthanasia of the retail ecosystem. GAME and its dwindling brethren already resemble melancholy museums of a dying civilisation. When the last physical copies disappear, so too does the casual browser’s chance encounter with a bargain, the tactile pleasure of scanning shelves, the small human theatre of the high street. Everything funnels toward the great digital silo where prices are whatever the algorithm decides they ought to be on any given Tuesday. Competition, that tiresome old concept, becomes a nostalgic memory, like rotary telephones or honest politicians.

One might expect howls of outrage from the gaming commentariat. Instead, the reaction has been the familiar blend of resigned cynicism and performative fury. Some speak of boycotts, as though the industry had not already calculated that the vocal minority will be outnumbered by the silent majority who simply want to shoot aliens with minimal friction. Others announce their intention to retreat to PC gaming, where Steam at least offers the illusion of ownership and the occasional generous sale. A few, in the grand tradition of cornered consumers everywhere, mutter darkly about piracy, conveniently forgetting that the same companies they now distrust spent years telling us that pirates were morally equivalent to maritime terrorists.

The truth is more melancholy. We have been trained, across multiple industries, to accept the exchange of ownership for convenience. It is easier, after all. No more scratched discs, no more trips to the shop, no more storage problems. The machine remembers what you bought better than you do—until, of course, it forgets. In the gleaming future, your entire library will exist in a shimmering cloud, accessible from any device until the day the cloud decides it would prefer a different business model. At that point you may reflect, with the bitter wisdom of hindsight, that convenience was the sugar coating on the relinquishment of control.

Sony have not merely changed a distribution format; they have completed the conversion of the customer into the product’s permanent, grateful subscriber. The disc is dead. The licence reigns supreme. And somewhere in a brightly lit Tokyo conference room, a group of executives is doubtless already calculating how much more profitable it is to sell people the same dream repeatedly than to let them wake up and keep it.

HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE'S A VERY NORTHERN BOY

One does sometimes wonder whether British politics, in its tireless pursuit of novelty, has not simply decided to run the same old reel of the 1970s backwards, hoping that this time the projector will behave. Enter Andy Burnham, lately Mayor of Greater Manchester, freshly minted MP for Makerfield, and now, by some mysterious alchemy of by-elections and coronations, the prime minister-in-waiting. The man has gone from municipal magnificence to Downing Street with the speed of a particularly determined Uber driver who has spotted a surge price. 

One almost admires the footwork. Almost. In his speech the other day – delivered, naturally, in Manchester, at the People’s History Museum, that reliquary of approved left-wing nostalgia – Burnham put what he called “the wealthy south on notice.” This is the sort of phrase that sounds bold in the echo chamber and faintly ridiculous once it escapes into the open air. One pictures the wealthy south – those notorious plutocrats of Guildford and Tunbridge Wells – trembling behind their aga cookers. The north, we are assured, shall rise again. Devolution shall be the watchword. Power will be wrested from the grasping tentacles of Westminster and redistributed to the regions, where, presumably, it will be exercised with the wisdom and restraint that have so far characterised local government in these islands.

The proposal for 'No 10 North' is particularly choice. Part of the Prime Minister’s office is to decamp to Manchester, presumably so that Burnham can feel at home without the inconvenience of actually living in London. One is reminded of those Roman emperors who, tiring of the eternal city, would set up a rival court in some provincial capital, usually with disastrous results for the tax base. Here the intention is framed as rebalancing, a noble correction of historical injustice. The subtext, of course, is rather more practical: the Red Wall, that fragile crust of former Labour seats that crumbled under the weight of reality, must be rebuilt with the mortar of regional pride. Reform UK has been making uncomfortable inroads; best to remind the northern voter that a chap from the north is now in charge, or at least has part of his filing cabinets up there.

Burnham speaks of replacing 'trickle-down economics' with 'good growth.' The phrase has the unmistakable whiff of the seminar room. 'Good growth' appears to mean more state ownership, more council houses, and the sort of economic rebalancing that usually involves taking money from productive areas and spraying it across less productive ones while calling it solidarity. One awaits the precise definition with the quiet dread of a man watching a new chef experiment with molecular gastronomy. The last time we tried this recipe in earnest we ended up with the Winter of Discontent: rubbish piling in the streets, bodies unburied, and the country looking for all the world like a particularly gloomy episode of Coronation Street written by a committee of trade unionists. The speech itself was a masterclass in the genre. Pro-left journalists nodded along like those little dogs one used to see in the back windows of cars. The sketch writer from the Daily Mail was, one gathers, not invited – a small but telling detail. When your idea of pluralism is to exclude the scribblers who might notice the joins in the rhetoric, one begins to wonder whether the 'rebalancing of power' might eventually extend to the press. North Korea is doubtless watching with interest.

Then there are the WASPI women, that awkward constituency Burnham once courted with promises of compensation before the realities of fiscal arithmetic intervened. Ten billion here, ten billion there; pretty soon you’re talking about serious money. Higher taxes across the board are clearly on the menu. One suspects the wealthy south will not be the only ones footing the bill. The north, after all, must be paid for, and the immigrants Labour has so enthusiastically welcomed will require housing. Those shiny new council houses will not, one gathers, be reserved exclusively for the native-born. Burnham’s past record as Mayor of Manchester has been politely airbrushed for the occasion. The grooming gangs scandal, the testimony of Maggie Oliver and the victims – these are not topics for the victory lap. Better to focus on the shiny rhetoric of devolution and the ten-year plan. Ten years! One wonders whether he seriously believes he will still be around to see it through. His approval ratings, even before taking the top job, already tilt negative. The public has a way of growing restless when the rhetoric meets the rates bill.

And who is apparently lined up to steady the economic ship? Ed Miliband, the eco-zealot whose previous stint in high office suggested a man who could lose an argument with a wind turbine. The hits, as they say, keep coming. What is most striking about Burnham’s ascent is the constitutional insouciance of it all. A man who was not even an MP a few weeks ago is now on the verge of becoming Prime Minister without the tiresome formality of a general election. He demanded one when the Tories changed leaders; now that the shoe is on the other foot, the principle appears less pressing. This is not democracy so much as musical chairs with nuclear codes. The public, having voted for Starmer’s Labour in 2024, did not vote for Burnham’s particular brand of northern municipal socialism. No one, as the saying goes, voted for this.

The technique is familiar. Divide the country neatly into north and south, virtuous provinces and decadent capital, then present yourself as the champion of the former. It worked moderately well for various Scottish nationalists and it may work again. Whether it produces competent government is another matter. The country already labours under sluggish growth, high immigration, and strained public services. The solution, apparently, is more of the medicine that contributed to the malady: more state, more spending, more division dressed up as fairness. One tries, as the post’s author gamely claims to have tried, to find something positive in the prospect. Burnham is affable enough on television. He has the common touch. Yet affability is no substitute for coherence, and the common touch becomes rather less appealing when it is used to usher in policies that have failed before with monotonous regularity. 

If this is the best Labour can offer after its brief stint in office, one shudders to think what the next decade holds. The north, we are told, cannot trust a word he says. The country as a whole may soon reach the same conclusion. In the meantime, the spectacle continues: a would-be prime minister playing regional champion while quietly preparing to expand the state and its claims upon the citizen. Britain has survived worse. It has, alas, also survived better. The Winter of Discontent may yet return, not with a bang but with a devolved whimper, delivered from a secondary office in Manchester. Pass the heating oil; we may need it.

VICTOR WILLIS (1951 -2026): AN OBITUARY

Victor Willis, the only unambiguously heterosexual policeman in the annals of popular music, has finally hung up his handcuffs, one day shy of his seventy-fifth birthday – a timing so neat it suggests even mortality couldn’t resist a disco beat. Born in 1951, the son of a San Francisco Baptist minister, Willis arrived in New York with a voice trained in gospel and a constitutional immunity to irony. 

While others in the Village People were busy auditioning for posterity in leather chaps, Willis – resplendent in his regulation cop uniform – insisted that “Y.M.C.A.” was merely a wholesome hymn to physical fitness and male camaraderie. One admired the sheer audacity of a straight man fronting what looked like a mobile Gay Pride float and then treating the resulting global innuendo as someone else’s problem. It was like watching a teetotaller conduct an open-bar party and claiming the punch was fruit cordial. 

Jacques Morali, the French producer who assembled the group like a novelty cake, recognised in Willis the perfect straight man – in every sense. Willis wrote or co-wrote the hits that turned disco into a worldwide municipal anthem: “Macho Man,” “In the Navy,” and “Go West.”, for which the crowning irony arrived in 1993 when the Pet Shop Boys covered it. Where Willis had offered a straight man’s pep talk to the frontier, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe delivered a flamboyant, wistful, orchestral sigh of knowing resignation. It was as if the Village People’s cop had been gently arrested by reality and remanded into the custody of those who understood the joke all along.

There were the usual rock-star detours – drugs, arrests, a spell in the wilderness – but Willis outlasted most of his colleagues and the entire disco era itself. He won copyright battles that secured his royalties, returned to touring, and maintained, with heroic literal-mindedness, that young men at the Y were simply enjoying 'straight fun.' In an age of compulsory ambiguity, his refusal to wink was almost avant-garde. 

He leaves a wife, Karen, and a catalogue that will outlive us all. Whenever strangers throw their hands in the air at weddings, sports events or political rallies, they are performing an unwitting act of Willis worship. The man who sang about the Navy never went down with the ship. He simply sailed on, straight as a die, while the rest of us wondered what the joke was.