Sony’s decision to end game disc production and go fully digital in 2028 was met with no small amount of backlash. Concerns range from loss of the ability to trade in old games on new ones to the potential inability to play games when services are offline—which happens—or accounts are lost, not to mention the basic principle of the thing: What do you really own if your ownership is dependent upon the whims of a distant digital platform?
Despite that pushback, Sony isn’t changing its mind: During the company’s latest earnings call, chief financial officer Lin Tao said she knows people have “strong views” on the topic, but so does Sony, and its view is that it’s going to happen.
“There are various reasons we made this decision,” Tao said in response to an analyst’s question about the driving factors behind the change. “The biggest being that the digitalization of contents overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor.
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“It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of contents, digitalization is progressing, and so when we think about the future, we put in a lot of thought and time. We cautiously considered this, we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward.”
The comments are translated and I assume the bit about “moving cautiously” is meant to indicate that Sony put in the appropriate levels of thought and research before reaching its decision—because the actual end of production doesn’t strike me as “cautious” so much as mashing the brakes with both feet when 2028 hits.
Tao said Sony has received feedback from people who love games and have “fond memories” of them. “We understand those emotions,” Tao said. “We want to consider that, and in the future digital ecosystem, ‘how do we engage the gamers’ is something that we would like to continue to explore.”
For the short term, Tao said the announcement had no impact on the company’s business, and she doesn’t expect that to change much when physical disc sales actually end because a large portion of Sony’s game sales are already digital anyway.
It’s not surprising that Sony isn’t backing away from its decision to end physical disc production. It clearly wasn’t a rushed or unconsidered call, and the world has changed a great deal since Don Mattrick dropped his famous livin’ on a submarine comment: The entire PC games market has effectively gone digital, and it’s bigger than ever.
The call took a more interesting turn near the end, though, when an analyst asked if ditching physical disc support risks making future PlayStation consoles more like those all-digital PCs—a point PC Gamer editor Wes Fenlon made shortly after the announcement—and how Sony plans to go about differentiating them.
“Our strength is the curated contents, that’s one of our strengths. The game environment being stable, that’s another strength. Compared to the high-end gaming PC, our product is more affordable,” Tao said.
“We don’t feel that the disc itself is a strong factor for differentiation. Going forward, we can coexist peacefully with PC games.”
As a long-time PC gamer I see Sony’s curation and “stability” in a somewhat different light: Certainly there are fewer headaches, but there’s also considerably less freedom and flexibility. But that’s always been the case, and will remain so with or without an optical drive in the box.
The comment about pricing is also interesting. Certainly a high-end enthusiast PC is going to cost a whole bunch more than a console, but recent estimates pegged the materials cost of the PlayStation 6 at more than $900, leaving very little space between it and the Steam Machine. Sony may choose to subsidize the cost of the PS6 to some extent to make it more manageable, but with the RAMpocalypse expected to get worse before it gets better, I have to wonder if Tao is being a little overly optimistic about the impact of price difference.
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