Sony isn’t phasing out discs quite as quickly as we thought

Sony confirmed it will end production of brand-new PlayStation discs in January 2028, but its discmaking division has pushed back on one widely reported detail about how rapidly that will happen. Two months after reports suggested the company’s last disc plant was already being repurposed, an unnamed Sony DADC spokesperson told Game journalist Brian Crecente that a prior account had misstated the scale of the Thalgau facility’s decline. According to the spokesperson, Dietmar — identified in earlier coverage as the division’s president — had anticipated an overall product-volume drop of 10 percent in 2028, not a reduction down to 10 percent of previous output. That clarification reverses the interpretation that the plant would all but stop making discs next year. Sony DADC did not answer The Verge’s request for further fact-checking, including questions about an ORF Austria report that every one of the plant’s roughly 300 employees would be retrained to work on microlenses. The division also declined to give additional details to Crecente about the plant’s restructuring plans. One reason disc production may continue to have a role after the January 2028 cutoff is that Sony will permit publishers to place re-orders for existing PlayStation disc titles. Even with continued re-orders, broader debates about the future of physical game ownership persist: several major publishers are not participating in Microsoft’s disc-to-digital initiative, and Sony has recently argued in legal filings that consumers cannot reasonably be said to “own” games in the traditional sense.