Sony's 2028 PlayStation Disc Plan May Be Cracking Under Pressure
During episode 380 of his podcast, Broken Silicon, Moore’s Law is Dead revealed that he was aware of a in-depth survey Sony had recently sent out to developers. According to the YouTuber and frequent leaker, one of the topics concerned physical game releases. “There was question on it asking if [developers] had a, basically, trying to ask in a not direct way, is there an issue with how [Sony] sells games physically…asking developers for feedback on killing discs.”
While some PlayStation owners attempted to stage a boycott of the platform last month to show the company they weren’t happy with the move to kill discs, it was a limited effort that was unlikely to force a reversal of the decision. Sony declined to comment on the matter, likely hoping it would go away with enough time.
However, getting feedback from developers in support of being able to release a title on a disc would go much further. That’s because, if the PlayStation 6 has any chance of building market share, it will only be possible with support from as many developers as possible. Sony simply can’t afford to lose any developers with its next generation console while it struggles to get its first-party games out the door thanks to extremely long development timelines.
Despite the supposed existence of these surveys, it doesn’t mean that physical game releases will be saved for at least one more console generation. Even if we take Tom at his word and assume that these surveys were real and included the query he noted, we still don’t know how respondents answered the question. It might just be that Sony and Microsoft got the feedback needed to push full steam ahead into the all-digital future.
