Sony has already begun plans to reassign staff at a major disc production plant, following its decision to kill off production of physical PS5 games.
While Sony has said that all new PS5 games will go digital-only from January 2028, hundreds of employees at the company’s disc factory in Thalgau, Austria are now set to be retrained — sparking questions over whether Sony will begin damping down disc launches sooner.
Currently, an astonishing 600,000 discs are made at Sony’s factory every day, with PS5 games accounting for half of its total output. But this figure will soon be slashed dramatically, and staff instead put to work on manufacturing something else: optical microlenses.
“PlayStation currently accounts for approximately 50 percent of our volume, and of that, approximately 20 percent are new orders,” Dietmar Tanzer, CEO of Sony DADC [Digital Audio Disc Corporation] told local news source Salzburg ORF. “We are talking about roughly 10 percent of the volume in 2028.”
Sony’s decision sent shockwaves around the industry upon its announcement earlier this week, with a strongly negative response from fans and other developers, and ridicule from celebrities and brands. But amid the complaints and the sense that this is truly the end of an era in video games, the numbers show physical game purchasing declining rapidly year-on-year.
Tanzer stated that Sony’s decision to go discless won’t result in job losses at the Thalgau factory, though its 300-strong staff will go through retraining to instead focus on making “micro optics”, such as lenses that can project a car turn signal onto the road.
Analysts have pointed to Sony’s announcement about PS5 games going all-digital as evidence that there are no plans for PS6 to support discs, either. This report appears to back this up further, with no suggestion that disc production will ramp up again for the start of Sony’s next console generation as the company suggests it won’t sell hardware at a significant loss despite the RAMpocalypse.
A disc-less PS6 makes sense, analyst Piers Harding-Rolls suggested this week, to keep spiralling component costs down by omitting a disc drive on new hardware. “Sony will be looking for all the ways it can reduce the cost of its next-gen console, and this is an easy win,” he wrote.
“It’s possible that an add-on disc drive could be made available to play older PS4 and PS5 games on disc,” Harding-Rolls continued. “Removing the drive will upset some gamers that don’t want to pay for an add-on disc drive (if available) and that want to access their game collections on disc. It may be too impractical or too complex, but some process of transferral for older physical media to a digital license could alleviate some of these issues.”
Of course, it’s likely not just Sony doing away with discs. Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox, codenamed Project Helix, will reportedly release without a disc drive. In tandem, Microsoft is said to be exploring a new disc-to-digital feature that would let users put a disc into their console and gain a digital license for the game, giving them the ability to play it without a disc.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social