There is one Blockbuster left on Earth. It sits in Bend, Oregon, rents films for 99 cents, and draws tourists who photograph it like a monument.

At its 2004 peak, Blockbuster ran about 9,000 stores worldwide. It filed for bankruptcy in 2010, and the last corporate stores closed by 2014. The chain famous for late fees is now a gift shop that happens to rent DVDs.

The video shop went first. The game shop is going now. GameStop closed roughly 727 stores in the United States in its 2024 financial year, and began shutting about 430 more in January 2026. In Britain, GAME ended its pre-owned trade-in business in early 2024. In Australia, EB Games closed 33 stores in its 2024 financial year and is shutting every store in New Zealand. The counter where you traded a finished game for a new one is disappearing.

We are losing the places where games were social.

The disc is nearly gone already

On 1 July 2026, Sony said it will stop producing discs for all new PlayStation games from January 2028. Discs you already own keep working. New games will sell as downloads, or as a box with a download code inside it. Sony's chief financial officer, Lin Tao, told investors on 31 July that the shift is already done in practice. In Sony's 2025 financial year, digital made up about 85% of its full-game software sales. The research firm Ampere Analysis put PlayStation's digital share close to 80%. Either figure tells the same story. The disc drive is already optional, since the PS5 Digital Edition and the Xbox Series S ship with no drive at all. The console that still reads discs also got dearer, rising to $649.99 in April 2026.

You were only ever renting

Here is the part the disc hid. When you bought a cartridge or a disc, you owned that copy. You could lend it, sell it, or leave it to your kids. The law backs this up. The first-sale doctrine lets the owner of a physical copy resell or lend it. Courts have refused to extend that right to digital files. In the United States, the ReDigi ruling in 2018 killed the idea of a second-hand digital store. In the European Union, the Tom Kabinet ruling in 2019 treated a downloaded book as a licensed service, which carries no resale right. A download is a licence, and a licence can be taken back.

This has already happened. When Ubisoft shut the servers for its racing game The Crew on 31 March 2024, everyone who bought it, disc included, was locked out of a game they had paid for. In 2026, Sony told PlayStation users in the UK and Europe it would delete 551 StudioCanal films from accounts that had already bought them. Google closed its Stadia service in January 2023 and took whole libraries with it. California noticed. Its law AB 2426, in force since January 2025, now bans shops from using the word buy for a digital product unless they admit you are only licensing it.

The backlash is real. A campaign called Stop Killing Games, started after The Crew was switched off, gathered more than 1.4 million signatures across Europe. People know the difference between owning and borrowing, even when the checkout button says buy.

Consumer groups saw it coming. Kim Bayley, who runs Britain's Entertainment Retailers Association, called Sony's decision "a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice". In Mexico, lawmakers filed a competition complaint. Senator Luis Donaldo Colosio said buyers pay an owner's price for a tenant's rights.

You pay full price and own nothing.

Who wins and who loses

Follow the money and the decision makes sense. Sony keeps close to 100% of a digital sale and about 65% of a disc sale once shops and freight take their cut, according to Bernstein analysis reported by the Financial Times. Goldman Sachs analyst Minami Munakata estimates the move could lift Sony's gaming margin by about three percentage points in the 2028 financial year. Publishers win too, because a subscription and a download bill you again and again. Nintendo, still shipping cartridges, can now sell ownership as a feature. So can the record industry, where US vinyl sales rose for an 18th straight year to $1.4bn in 2024 and outsold CDs, according to the RIAA.

The losers are easy to name. Players lose resale, lending and gifting. The second-hand market goes with them. CNBC put it near $7bn, and Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter says at least a third of games have historically sold used. Retailers lose the traffic. And the culture loses its supply lines. Diamond, the distributor that fed comic shops for more than 40 years, filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 and was liquidated by the end of that December. The twist worth noting is that physical comics themselves still sold about $1bn in 2025. The object held on. The middleman did not.

What a business owner should take from this

Say what you are actually selling. If your product is a licence, a subscription or access, name it in plain words. California now makes that a legal requirement for digital goods, and the rest of the world tends to follow California. Customers who feel tricked into renting will remember it.

Make ownership the selling point. Vinyl, Nintendo cartridges and the right-to-repair movement all show the same thing. People will pay more for something that stays theirs. If your competitors are quietly shifting buyers onto leases and subscriptions, real ownership is a position you can take and they cannot easily copy.

Sell the room, not just the transaction. The game shop, the video store and the comic shop all sold the same hidden product: a place to belong and people to talk to. That is why the last Blockbuster survives on merch and memory. Whatever your midnight queue is, build it and protect it, because the download button cannot.

The next brand people trust will sell things they get to keep.