Vinyl has an actual functional use to audiophiles in that it has amazing sound quality. I'm very much a fan of physical media and exclusively buy physical, but there is no functional use to it outside of collecting in gaming the end product is identical
People comparing this to Blu-ray or DVD is also a pretty lousy argument. Movies will always be made and everybody has a DVD player. If Sony or msft decide to stop using a disc drive then that's it, no more physical. Sure you can get physical on PC or something, but I'd bet this console generation is the last with a disc drive at least for sony and msft
I agree that most of the analogies are not useful, none of them are actually that close except maybe "PC gaming".
Anyone can press vinyls with the right equipment and permission from the artist. There are nominal fees associated with CD / DVD / BR but otherwise they're maintained by standards bodies that you can purchase licenses from. The BluRay consortium does not get more money if you digitally download a film versus buying physical. Films can be trivially converted between mediums, file formats, and levels of quality, even by amateurs at home using free software. Sony and Microsoft have full control over who can and cannot license and print games for their platforms, so as you say, if they put their foot down, it's over.
The decreasing number of people buying physical is really an interesting trend. Gaming itself is so different from films and music. You need servers, installs, additional downloads and ongoing updates for both fixes and . There are major service components. DRM for gaming is as intrusive (or perhaps more so) than it has been for any other medium ever. The archival benefits of having a physical copy of a game becomes decreasingly useful the more reliant on the internet games become.
PC gaming has already gone through it's "yeah, physical is basically dead now" phase. People don't even buy disc drives for most computers anymore, and haven't for years. Case manufacturers have stopped making slots for them. Laptops phased them out 5-7 years ago except occasional business models. Games ship with disc cases and a CD Key you register. Not every game, but an increasing number. Even when games do have discs it's commonplace for people to never use them.
The reason PC gaming went this way is because over time, the utility of having the discs declined - internet connection speeds increased, CD keys became one-time-use codes registered to accounts, you needed to constantly update online for a lot of games anyway, you couldn't play offline for a fair few games, and so on. The convenience of digital stores, Steam in particular, became very attractive, paired with very deep discounts and the like. DVD software on PC was kinda crappy in many cases, and Blu Ray software is
dreadful with no good free options. Multiple interlocking trends allowed physical media to basically die on PC,
even though nobody forced it to.
I suspect Sony and Microsoft will still offer some kind of drive-based model for a few good years, and both will be cautious to be the first one to announce they're dropping them for future platforms because the first one to do so will be a lightning rod for outrage and bad press, but eventually, yeah, it feels inevitable that they'll eventually consider it nolonger worth the cost of having. Maybe we'll see external optional disc drives for consoles that allow you to run BR movies and games, but with the base consoles themselves not even bothering to ship with the drives.
What's the timeline here? 2-3 years is obviously too short, but the trends seem very clear. Publishers want it, the platform holders want it - it means more money for both of them. And an increasing number of gamers are jumping onboard even without being forced, for many of the same reasons PC gamers did (innate benefits of digital + declining benefits for physical).
