Sony's decision to bury physical games once and for all continues to be a hotly debated topic, with many gamers feeling deeply disappointed. This has led people to protest in various ways, one of the most notable of which is likely the attempts to get as many people as possible to cancel their PS Plus subscriptions.
The problem is that there are probably too few people who will take the bait for this to have any real effect. At least that's what the well-known Japanese analyst Dr. Serkan Toto says in an interview with IGN, and he believes that Sony is just waiting for the storm to pass (as we all know, the internet's memory is very short), even though he sympathises with the upset gamers:
"I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision. They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass."
Toto argues that, in the end, too few people will join the protests, and that digital games are so much more lucrative that Sony simply doesn't care:
"Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users. Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let's say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough to Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative."
Voting with their wallets is one of the few things gamers can do to get companies to listen. Revenue is, after all, what matters most to them, and if enough people act, it adds up to real money, and that's a message that carries weight. But as Toto points out, it's doubtful whether it will ultimately have any impact on Sony if bigger numbers can't be reached.