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| The dual shift in media consumption: Sunsetting physical discs alongside the rise of synthetic media IP in SEA. |
On 1 July 2026, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that physical game disc production for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will end from January 2028. New titles will thereafter be distributed digitally through the PlayStation Store and digital retailers, while games released or scheduled before the transition will remain unaffected. Sony described the decision as a response to the continuing shift in consumer preference towards digital media. [1]
The announcement is significant, but perhaps not for the reason it first appears.
The important shift is not simply from physical to digital.
It is from possession to access.
A physical game disc gives a consumer something tangible: an object that can be retained, resold, traded or preserved with a greater degree of independence from the platform that originally sold it. A digital purchase operates differently. Access increasingly depends on a platform, an account, a licence and the continued availability of the underlying service.
Sony's announcement therefore represents more than the disappearance of a piece of plastic. It illustrates how the economics of digital media have steadily moved from ownership towards controlled access. Sony has already reported that digital downloads account for the overwhelming majority of its full-game sales, making the physical-to-digital transition less a sudden rupture than the formalisation of an existing business model. [2]
But the ownership question does not stop with consumers.
Who owns the thing that the machine helped create — and who controls the data, authorship and provenance behind it?
Across Southeast Asia, governments and industries are simultaneously trying to turn animation, film, games, characters and digital content into valuable original intellectual property. Malaysia is explicitly positioning its digital creative sector around homegrown IP and global competitiveness. [5] Thailand is building international markets around film, series, animation, characters and creative IP. [6] [7] Indonesia, meanwhile, is developing AI governance around creator protection, fairness and responsible adoption as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the creative economy. [8]
This creates a striking parallel.
Consumers are being moved from owning media to accessing media, while creators are being asked to create more valuable intellectual property in an environment where the boundaries of authorship, ownership and control are becoming increasingly fluid.
That is where the ownership illusion becomes more interesting.
Because the question is no longer simply whether we own the thing we buy.
It is whether creators can still own the value they create.
The Death of the Disc: From Possession to Access
The appeal of physical media has never been purely nostalgic.
A physical copy creates a degree of separation between the consumer and the platform that distributes the content. Once the disc is in the consumer's possession, the physical object can exist independently of a particular storefront.
Digital distribution removes much of that friction.
It is faster, cheaper to distribute and easier to update. It also allows publishers to deliver patches, expansions and live-service features that a static physical object cannot provide.
But convenience comes with a trade-off.
The consumer's relationship with the content increasingly passes through the platform.
A useful distinction therefore emerges:
Physical media provides possession of a copy.
Digital distribution provides access to a copy under a set of technological and contractual conditions.
That distinction matters because platforms are not permanent.
Storefronts close. Servers are retired. Authentication systems change. Licensing arrangements expire. Companies restructure or disappear. Even when previously purchased content remains accessible, the infrastructure required to maintain that access is controlled by someone else.
Sony's own announcement sits within this broader transition. The company reported that digital sales already represented approximately 80% of full-game sales in its fiscal 2025, making the economic direction of travel clear. [2]
The question is therefore not whether digital distribution is better or worse than physical media.
It is:
How much control does the consumer retain when access becomes the product?
That is a very different question from whether a disc is convenient.
And it is one that extends far beyond gaming.
Music, film, books, software and even professional tools have all moved progressively towards platforms, subscriptions and account-based access.
The physical object once served as the boundary between the customer and the distributor.
The platform now sits between them.
The Ownership Problem Moves to AI
If the consumer side of the digital economy is shifting from possession to access, the creative side is experiencing a parallel shift from authorship to provenance.
Generative AI makes this especially visible.
The simplistic interpretation is that AI-generated work has no copyright.
The reality is more nuanced.
The U.S. Copyright Office's analysis of generative AI concluded that AI-assisted works can remain copyrightable where a human determines sufficient expressive elements. Human-authored material can be incorporated into an AI-assisted work, and creative arrangement or modification can contribute to copyrightability. Merely providing prompts, however, does not by itself establish sufficient human authorship. [3]
The important question, therefore, is not simply:
Was AI used?
It is:
Where did the human creativity remain?
That distinction could become commercially important for Southeast Asian studios building original characters, stories, games, animation and visual worlds.
A creative company that uses AI as part of its production pipeline may still possess valuable intellectual property.
But it may increasingly need to demonstrate how that IP came into existence.
Who created the concept?
Who designed the characters?
Who determined the narrative?
Who selected and modified the outputs?
Which assets were generated?
Which were human-created?
Which tools and models were used?
What licences governed those tools?
What source materials entered the workflow?
The production pipeline itself can therefore become part of the IP record.
The Authorship Gap
This creates what we might call an authorship gap.
The more expressive decisions are delegated to an AI system, the more difficult it can become to distinguish human authorship from machine output.
That does not make AI inherently hostile to intellectual property.
It makes provenance more important.
For creative businesses, the future IP file may need to contain more than the finished artwork or film. It may need to document the human decisions, source assets, licences and production history that establish how the work was created.
In other words:
The creative process itself may become evidence of ownership.
Southeast Asia's IP Moment
This question matters particularly in Southeast Asia because the region is no longer interested only in being a production destination.
It increasingly wants to own the IP.
Malaysia's digital creative industry has been developing homegrown animation and gaming properties while seeking greater international reach. The Malaysian government has identified original IP, local talent and global competitiveness as important parts of its digital creative strategy. [5]
Thailand is pursuing a similar ambition. Its 2026 content strategy spans film, television, games, animation and characters, with the government explicitly seeking to position Thai content and intellectual property for international markets. [6]
Indonesia is moving in the same direction. Its Ministry of Creative Economy has described IP and AI as important to Southeast Asia's strategic autonomy, particularly as economic value shifts from physical assets towards intangible assets such as intellectual property, digital content and technological capability. [8]
This is an important change in the regional creative economy.
The objective is no longer simply:
Can Southeast Asia produce content for the world?
It is increasingly:
Can Southeast Asia create, own and monetise the intellectual property behind that content?
That distinction becomes critical in an AI-driven production environment.
Thailand's wider creative-economy strategy also treats intellectual property as an economic asset. Its Department of Intellectual Property is working with industry partners on a national IP development agenda that encompasses legal reform, stronger enforcement, international alignment and the development of commercial markets around characters and creative IP — with the broader aim of pushing Thai creators and their intellectual property into international markets. [5]
Indonesia's Ministry of Creative Economy was already convening discussions in June 2026 around AI, innovation, governance and fairness for creators. The ministry has also emphasised responsible AI use and the need to protect creative practitioners as AI becomes part of the creative economy. [9]
The direction across the region is therefore becoming clear.
Creative IP is becoming an economic asset.
And AI is becoming part of the machinery through which that asset is created, distributed and transformed.
That creates a new strategic question:
Who controls the rules at the intersection of creative work, AI systems and intellectual property?
The Training-Data Question
There is another layer to the ownership problem.
Before an AI system generates something new, it has to learn from something that already exists.
That raises a fundamental question:
Who gets to decide whether creative work becomes training material?
The debate is already moving beyond the simplistic argument of whether AI is "good" or "bad" for creators.
It is increasingly about licensing, consent, attribution, compensation and the conditions under which copyrighted material can be used in AI development.
The U.S. Copyright Office has been examining both the copyrightability of AI outputs and the separate issue of copyrighted works being used to train AI systems. [3] [4] Its AI initiative treats these as distinct but connected policy questions.
For Southeast Asian creators, this matters because the region is developing creative industries whose competitive value increasingly lies in locally generated cultural and creative assets.
Characters, stories, music, visual identities and distinctive creative works are not merely content. They can become intellectual property — while styles, motifs and cultural expressions may raise more complicated questions of protection, attribution and cultural ownership.
If those assets enter global AI ecosystems without clear rules governing their use, the region risks creating a strange asymmetry:
Southeast Asia owns the creative output, but someone else may control the infrastructure that determines how that output is absorbed, reproduced and transformed.
That is where digital ownership becomes a question of creative sovereignty.
The New Ownership Stack
The response to this changing environment should not be a rejection of digital distribution or generative AI.
It should be a stronger understanding of what ownership actually requires.
For Consumers: Preserve Access
Consumers need to distinguish between:
- owning a physical copy;
- purchasing a digital licence;
- subscribing to a service; and
- streaming content.
These are not equivalent forms of ownership.
The more a product depends on a platform, the more important questions of portability, preservation, offline access and long-term availability become.
Digital literacy therefore needs to evolve beyond knowing how to use a platform.
It needs to include understanding what rights remain when the platform changes.
For Creative Studios: Preserve Provenance
For studios using AI, the production pipeline should increasingly document:
- human creative contributions;
- original source material;
- AI-generated components;
- tools and models used;
- licensing conditions;
- asset provenance; and
- final human editorial decisions.
This does not mean AI must remain merely an "auxiliary" tool.
It means the organisation should know where its human authorship and contractual rights begin and end.
The more valuable the IP, the more important that distinction becomes.
For Governments: Preserve Bargaining Power
For Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, the challenge is larger than simply regulating AI.
These countries are attempting to build creative economies in which locally generated IP can travel globally and generate value at home.
That requires legal and commercial frameworks capable of addressing:
- AI-assisted authorship;
- training-data rights;
- licensing;
- attribution;
- creator compensation;
- digital preservation; and
- cross-border enforcement.
The strategic objective should not be to keep technology out.
It should be to ensure that local creators are not reduced to raw material inside someone else's technology ecosystem.
The Alpha Takeaway
Ownership is changing shape.
The physical disc gave consumers something they could hold.
The digital platform gives them access.
Generative AI gives creators unprecedented production power — while complicating the question of who authored, trained, transformed and ultimately controls the resulting work.
The common thread is not technology.
It is control.
Who controls access?
Who controls provenance?
Who controls the data?
Who controls the right to reproduce?
And who gets paid when value moves from one layer of the ecosystem to another?
For Southeast Asia's emerging creative economies, these are not abstract legal questions.
Original characters, animation, film, games and cultural expression are becoming economic assets. Protecting them will require more than producing more content. It will require clear provenance, meaningful human authorship, fair licensing and stronger negotiating power over the platforms through which that content is distributed and transformed.
The ownership illusion, then, is not that everything digital is worthless.
It is that access is the same thing as ownership.
It isn't.
And in the age of synthetic media, knowing the difference may become one of the most valuable forms of digital literacy.
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| Enterprise multi-agent deployment requires verified agent identities and unified governance layers directly on the data platform. |
References:
Sony's Physical-to-Digital Shift
[1] Sony Interactive Entertainment. (2026, July 1). Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. PlayStation.Blog. https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/
[2] Reuters. (2026, July 1). Sony to end discs for new PlayStation releases as gaming shifts online. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sony-end-discs-new-playstation-releases-gaming-shifts-online-2026-07-01/
AI Copyright & Authorship
[3] U.S. Copyright Office. (2025, January 29). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability. https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
[4] U.S. Copyright Office. (2025, May 9). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training [Pre-publication version]. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf
Southeast Asia's Creative-IP Ambition
[5] Ministry of Digital, Malaysia. (2026, January 30). Advancing Malaysia's digital creative industry towards AI Nation 2030. https://www.digital.gov.my/en-GB/siaran/Memacu-Industri-Kreatif-Digital-Malaysia-Ke-Arah-Negara-AI-2030
[6] Creative Economy Agency, Thailand. (2026). CEA Content Lab 2026. https://www.cea.or.th/en/single-project/content-lab-2026
[7] The Government Public Relations Department. (2026, June 11). Turning creativity into currency: Thailand's drive to build a soft power economy on intellectual property. https://thailand.go.th/issue-focus-detail/turning-creativity-into-currency-thailands-drive-to-build-a-soft-power-economy-on-intellectual-property
AI + Creator Sovereignty
[8] Kementerian Ekonomi Kreatif/Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Republik Indonesia. (2026, June 17). Menteri Ekraf: IP dan AI kunci otonomi strategis Asia Tenggara [Minister of Creative Economy: IP and AI are keys to Southeast Asian strategic autonomy]. https://ekraf.go.id/news/menteri-ekraf-ip-dan-ai-kunci-otonomi-strategis
[9] Kementerian Ekonomi Kreatif/Badan Ekonomi Kreatif Republik Indonesia. (2026, June 5). Ministry of Creative Economy strengthens AI governance to protect creators and foster innovation. https://ekraf.go.id/news-en/ministry-of-creative-economy-strengthens-ai-governance-to-protect-creators-and-foster-innovation
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