This article was originally published on August 21, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Sony thrust the subject of physical videogame media to the fore last month by announcing that all PlayStation disc production will cease in January 2028. While serious consternation met the move, sales figures show clearly that contemporary retail habits have become resolutely digital, with the latest first-quarter financial releases from Square Enix and Capcom reporting that, of all sales for the period, 93.3 per cent and 90.1 per cent respectively were digital. Despite resistance, physical is on the way out.

But not for everyone.

Evercade, the Blaze Entertainment retro hardware line originally launched as a handheld in 2020, is a physical-only product based on cartridges stacked with licensed ROMs. The brand has since extended to a more traditional console offering, smaller Game Boy-style handhelds and bartop arcade units, with Nexus, the first Evercade handheld to feature twin sticks, releasing in October. If Evercade sounds buoyant, that's because it is.

"I think we must be hitting two million cartridges soon, if we haven't already," Blaze CEO Andrew Byatt tells Knowledge. "That'll be the next announcement."

Don't expect any hardware figures any time soon, though: "We don't give people usernames and accounts and all that stuff, because you're taking people away from what it used to be like. That means someone can buy three of our consoles, or ten, and we wouldn't know whether it was one person or ten. So we focus more on cartridge sales to see roughly how big the installed base is."

The good old days

It's this sense of nostalgia that underpins the entire Evercade concept.

"The intention is to bring back the original experience of buying and owning games, of opening the box and smelling the manual and blowing on the connector, all that kind of stuff," Byatt says. Collecting limited-edition items, a key part of all physical media, also plays a powerful role in making Evercade the success it's become. What started off as numbered cartridges in the early days of Evercade has turned into special-edition cartridge releases and even limited-run consoles. Nexus will have a Doom special edition, limited to 3,000 units. If you're thinking of grabbing one, forget it. Collectors are now wise to Evercade's success, and releasing special cartridges and hardware for games as notable as Doom certainly works: "They sell really, really well, and really quickly."

An appetite for physical media still exists, then, especially in the retro world. Evercade is performing so well, in fact, that Blaze is now talking about the next generation of its console strategy. All the hardware released so far is based on the same technology, which Byatt calls "Evercade 1". All Evercade consoles released to date play the same cartridges, of which there are now more than 100. Nexus is an Evercade 1 device, and includes features users have been requesting based on previous iterations, such as a larger screen and Bluetooth connectivity for headphones. However, a full upgrade appears to be on the cards.

Nexus is "probably coming towards the pinnacle of Evercade 1," says Byatt. "But, yeah, the plan is Evercade 2, and I think at some point that'll be a reality. That will be a new cartridge format, which is bigger capacity… [Evercade] 2 would be much more powerful."

Byatt also confirms that next-generation hardware will be backwards compatible with Evercade 1 cartridges.

Evercade be nimble

"Much more powerful" is not a popular sentiment in today's hardware manufacturing market. Thanks to the AI industry's insatiable need for memory and storage, costs related to high-end game hardware have rocketed in the past two years. While Evercade has been affected, Byatt brought Evercade's hardware contracts forward to lock margins for 2026 and has done the same for cartridges for 2027. Size, in this instance, matters.

"We're not one of the big boys, which means we can't negotiate huge contracts," he says. "But at the same time, it makes us quite nimble and we can take opportunities to grab stock. You know, 'Oh, there's 20,000 units over there – we'll have that.' It does help that you're not having to buy millions and millions of units."

All of which indicates Evercade's success is based on a real, underserved market, one that companies such as Sony appear to be dumping because its presence on financial spreadsheets is dropping to single percentage digits. Traditional game companies ending their relationship with physical media only plays to Evercade's advantage.

"We have seen an uptick on sales," Byatt says. "But, more importantly for us, it's just making people know we exist and communicating what we are, what we're not, and what our values are, how we're trying to build this up to be something special – to be an experience people like and enjoy."

He adds: "With the Sony announcement and the way things are going, we're just going to stubbornly say that we are the physical opportunity. We're going to keep owning physical in a different way and build that up. That's a really important thing for us. We don't believe physical has no value."

This article was originally published on August 21, 2026 - read the full issue