The writing has been on the wall for physical games like discs and cartridges for years. Still, plenty of gamers have held onto the hope that it would always have a place alongside digital downloads. As ownership concerns keep piling up, nothing beats actually owning the game you paid for. However, Sony might have paved the way for physical gaming extinction by pulling the plug on the factory that makes PlayStation discs.
Sony recently announced that it will stop producing Blu-ray discs for new PlayStation games beginning in January 2028. Existing games released before then won’t be affected, but the sudden and shocking announcement was widely seen as the beginning of the end. Both for PlayStation’s and perhaps gaming’s reliance on physical media.
Some gamers are still hoping that enough backlash could convince Sony to cancel — or at the very least, delay the plan. After all, the company reversed course on shutting down the PS3 and PS Vita PlayStation Stores after community outrage in 2021. Only recently it announced that they will finally close in July 2027.
Unfortunately, this time around, it may have already gone too far to turn back. As it turns out, one of Sony’s disc-manufacturing plants in Thalgau, Austria, is already being repurposed.
The plant currently produces roughly 600,000 discs every day, but workers and production lines have already been converted to manufacture optical microlenses instead. According to the Austrian media ORF.at, 300 employees have already been informed about the restructuring, and some have been reassigned from disc production.
Sony has also invested roughly €30 million (around $34 million) in new manufacturing technology, a decision said to have a ‘direct impact’ on disc production for future PlayStation games. In other words, this isn’t just a corporate announcement anymore — it’s already happening.
“PlayStation currently accounts for approximately 50% of our volume, and of that, approximately 20% are new orders. We are talking about roughly 10% of the volume in 2028,” says Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation CEO Dietmar Tanzer to the media through Google Translate. The microlenses produced at the plant itself are expected to be used in products such as automotive lighting.
Then again, physical games like discs and cartridges have been on borrowed time for years. Sony stopped manufacturing recordable Blu-ray discs back in January 2025 before discontinuing Blu-ray recorder hardware entirely this February. Three major cuts to its own physical media in just 18 months paint a very clear picture of where the company is headed. Sadly, the maths certainly supports this shift, too. Digital purchases now account for roughly 80% of PlayStation sales, while physical game spending in the US has plummeted. From $11.5 billion in 2009 to just $1.6 billion over the past year.
Looking back, Sony’s plan to cut off physical discs also makes GTA 6‘s code-in-the-box launch look a lot less surprising. At this point, it’s entirely possible a disc version was never part of Rockstar Games’s plans to begin with. Did Take-Two know Sony’s long-term roadmap beforehand or simply see the market trends? No one knows. But what looked like an isolated decision now feels more like a glimpse of where the entire industry is heading.
