PlayStation made the unpopular move of killing discs for games starting from 2028. You’d think that the move by Sony was piggybacking off of Grand Theft Auto VI not having one for the foreseeable future. But as it turns out, the truth may just be the other way round. The company has already begun converting its disc-making plant to making microlenses instead.
Austrian outlet ORF Salzburg reports that Sony has a disc-making plant in Thalgau that makes up to 600,000 discs a day. Half of them are for PlayStation, according to Dietmar Tanzer, the head of the company’s Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC). But since the videogames subsidiary is discontinuing game discs, this volume is expected to drop down to 10% in 2028. The report does not mention what the remaining 10% are for, but these will probably be continuing the handful of games that release just before 2028, fulfilling some residual obligations.
Notably though, the Thalgau plant is not only one of Sony’s disc production sites, but the only one that remains wholly owned by the company. It also currently employs about 300 employees, all of which will be retained following the transition. The workers are being retrained to make microlenses instead.
Also worth noting is that the transition to making microlenses happened quite awhile ago. A video news report by the Regional TV Salzburg from December 2024 shows some behind-the-scenes operations at the plant. As shown in the video, the plant has already started working on microlenses at the time. And more importantly, these are also created using discs, so perhaps the retraining necessary would be minimal.
According to the report, workers have also been “informed about the restructuring on Wednesday”. This suggests that they were told by Sony of the change in direction around the same time PlayStation made the announcement. That being said, mass production of said microlenses is only expected to start from 2027.
Separately, thanks to PlayStation announcing that game discs are dead in 2028, Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls predicts that the PlayStation 6 will be launched in late 2028. The console is also expected to “at a minimum: not have a disc drive. This will allow Sony to cut production costs, though these will likely remain high with the memory shortage crisis. That being said, it may still make an external drive for older PS4 and PS5 games.
(Source: ORF Salzburg, Ampere Analysis, Vimeo)
