Wararka: Sony isn’t phasing out discs quite as quickly as we thought
Sony isn’t backing away from its decision to kill the video game disc in January 2028. But Sony isn’t shutting down production as quickly as we thought, either. Two months after reports that Sony’s last discmaking plant was already being repurposed, the company’s discmaking division now says that one widely reported detail was wrong.
News
Sony isn’t phasing out discs quite as quickly as we thought
Sony’s last discmaking plant is reportedly decreasing production by 10 percent, not 90.
Sony’s last discmaking plant is reportedly decreasing production by 10 percent, not 90.
Details
Originally, it sounded like the division’s president said the Thalgau plant would produce 90 percent fewer discs in 2028 — but the reality is it will only produce 10 percent fewer discs in 2028, an unnamed Sony DADC spokesperson told Game journalist Brian Crecente.
“To clarify and avoid any misleading information: in that statement Dietmar anticipated an overall product volume decline by 10 percent, not a decline down to 10 percent,” the spokesperson said.
Sony DADC did not respond to The Verge’s fact-check request, including our question about whether the division is still restructuring and retraining every single one of the plant’s 300 employees to work on microlenses instead of discs, as ORF Austria reported in July. It wouldn’t tell Crecente any more details, either.
Analysis
One reason that the discmaking plant might take longer to transition: Even if Sony won’t produce brand-new games on disc after the January 2028 cutoff, the company will continue to let publishers “place re-orders for existing PlayStation disc games.”
Even if PlayStation discs stick around longer than we thought, the future isn’t looking good for the concept of video game ownership. Several major game publishers are conspicuously missing from Microsoft’s disc-to-digital initiative, and Sony keeps giving gamers reason to believe it doesn’t respect the idea of ownership at all.
Most recently, Sony made the breathtakingly blunt legal argument that “reasonable consumers” couldn’t possibly believe they own a game after they buy it — because if they truly owned a game, how could multiple copies exist at a time?
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