PlayStation's decision to end production of game discs in 2028 has quickly become one of the most hated decisions ever made by a gaming company, and not only by those that still purchase retail releases, due to the massive implications this decision will have for the entire gaming industry. Chances of the company backtracking, however, are slim, and not only because factories are being repurposed from making discs, but also because this "spreadsheet" decision has been a long time in the making, according to former PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden.
“I don't necessarily agree with it but I don't work in the business any more. Maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive to stamp out discs,” Layden said to Eurogamer. “If you look at any decision to discontinue a product or a feature or model or what have you, largely it's a straight spreadsheet decision. What are disc sales compared to digital sales? And I'm old enough to remember when digital sales were like 10 percent - I'm old enough to remember when digital sales were zero percent because we didn't have a digital market! And that number just grew over time.”
PlayStation's "spreadsheet" decision, and the obvious consequence of the PlayStation 6 launching without a disc drive, has been in the making for long time and eventually became possible with the advancements of broadband connections, according to Shawn Layden. “I've been asked this question every year for the last 20 years,” he said. “When are you guys going to just give up on the disc drive? My feeling with that was always: well, when I get to a place where I'm comfortable enough to believe that worldwide, broadband throughput is good enough to support that download experience, good enough to reach the majority of customers.” When reaching an 80% opportunity representing 95% of revenue, Layden asks “what's my incentive to keep the lights on for the other 20 percent if it's effectively only 5 percent of the business?”
As industry leaker KeplerL2 recently suggested, this move may have been made to curb the used game market, increase revenue and help offset the rising hardware costs that are set to push the PlayStation 6 price past what most expected, but the former PlayStation boss doesn't believe that is the case. “They [used game sales] used to be a huge factor,” he said. “The whole GameStop business model was driven around the used game, and then over time, the rise of digital kind of quashed that used-game business, and made it hard for folks who were making a nickel in the secondary market by selling them. I don't think that reality necessarily drives this decision because this has been happening over time. I think right now we've reached some kind of homeostasis where it's in a weird sort of balance. Second-hand gaming still occurs, obviously, but it's not material any more to the business to worry about, I think.”
As mentioned above, PlayStation backing away from the production of physical game discs has so many dangerous implications for consumer rights and game preservation that it has sparked widespread criticism and backlash, which is escalating fairly quickly. Besides signing petitions, gamers are also using every avenue at their disposal to let their disappointment known, so much so that Sony has disappeared from social media following the announcement. With the announcement message also getting Community Noted on X, it's clear how massive the backlash is getting, and rightly so. Hopefully, this will force the company to reverse its decision in some form, however unlikely it may seem at this point.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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