Yes there is a very simple reason which is massively anti-consumer. Every product competes with it's own predecessor. Physical products will sooner or later break, movies will sooner or later get boring, same goes for music. But video games are different. People are still playing Tetris and Super Mario 64. You release one good game and the next one has to be better otherwise people will just continue to play the previous one instead of buying the new one. Publishers try to control this aspect. They dont want you to own games only have a license to play. It's not even a question of "if" they going to take away your older games, but "when". They want to restrict access to the previous product so you will have to buy the new one. They want full control. Look at Call of Duty. All but, the newest titles are barely playable, and that is done by design.

They should have moved to USB keys a long time ago. Make them big and call them cartridges if you want, but optical discs are far too slow.

There's aso no reason the physical copy can't demand to get a validation token from Corporate Server every time it's played

Devils advocate here.

I/O and storage in those media formats are kinda limited for video games.

Blue-Ray prob has enough storage (at most we could go for multiple disk releases) capacity but still you would have to copy the games to disk.

I think GOG is on right track on this DRM free keep on disk as long as you want no need to check with external servers to play them.

You can buy games DRM free on GOG and burn them onto a disk yourself. Or multiple ones, if needed

I already have more games than I could ever finish in a lifetime — in 10 lifetimes — and they’re all digital, in big folders full of files. If I had those thousands of games in physical form I’d need a library in my house full of shelves to store them all, yet digitally I can carry them all around in my pocket!

Sony has always screwed consumers. No idea why anyone buys their products anyway

Or digital downloads without the killswitch (DRM)

it’s about consolidation, control and the ability to control dynamic pricing

The fundamental difference is that when you buy those formats, you are getting a final product. Nobody is stopping your disc in the middle, to ask if you want to download the special remix of this song, or a deleted scene.

Video games are now constantly upselling, and they can't do that if the consumer is isolated on their PC.

well, music and movies do not weight several hundred GB of data... but that's also modern games problem.

As a person working in gamdev - they ABSOLUTELY can optimise - people just doesn't care nowaday.

Sony thinking they can just pull a Steam way too late in the game, and with Steam and GOG as competitors 😂