Sony sparked a backlash among gamers with its decision to phase out physical game discs. Now Nintendo is reassuring its customers that it has no plans to follow suit anytime soon.

“We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily,” Bill van Zyll, VP and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America, said in a recent interview. “We also have a platform that was just launched. We’re barely just over a year into [Nintendo Switch 2]. It’s got both digital and physical—that capability. There’s no plans to ditch physical.”

Van Zyll’s comments are more of a reaffirmation than a new policy announcement. But in the current gaming environment, they’re giving Nintendo loyalists reason to breathe a sigh of relief.

Physical game sales have been a hot topic since Sony’s announcement earlier this year. The company plans to stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. From an economic standpoint, it’s hard to fault the decision. Just 15% of the PlayStation games sold in the fourth quarter of last year were physical copies. And as Sony develops its next-generation hardware, it’s undoubtedly trying to keep costs as low as possible, especially given recent spikes in the prices of memory and processor chips. Jettisoning a physical disc drive could help achieve that goal.

Still, for a company that once championed physical media—even mocking Microsoft’s restrictive game-sharing policies —the move was bound to cause controversy. And Sony made things worse for itself in September, arguing in a legal filing that players who purchase digital games are buying licenses rather than ownership of the games themselves .

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