No, Sony Isn't Killing the PlayStation Disc - Production Drops 10 Percent, Not to 10 Percent

For a day or two, the internet was busy burying the PlayStation disc. Reports claimed Sony was about to slash manufacturing to a tenth of current output - effectively the end of physical PlayStation games as we know them. Then came the correction: according to Eurogamer, comments from a Sony DADC executive were misread, and the division that actually presses the discs expects output to dip by 10 percent in 2028. Not to 10 percent. By 10.

That's the difference between "physical is dead" and "physical keeps shrinking slowly, like it has for years." One is a funeral, the other is a trend line we've all been watching for a decade. And it says something about the current mood that so many outlets ran with the funeral version without blinking. The story felt true, so it spread.

Why the disc still earns its keep in our region

I'll admit my bias here: I still buy discs, and not out of nostalgia. In our region, physical copies do real financial work. A disc can be resold when you're done with it, lent to a friend, or picked up noticeably cheaper a few months after launch at retail. Digital storefront prices, meanwhile, tend to sit stubbornly close to full price far longer. When a new release costs 80 euros digitally, a disc you can sell on afterwards isn't sentimentality - it's basic maths for a normal player's budget.

So no, the panic wasn't justified. But I wouldn't pop the champagne either. A 10 percent decline is still a decline, and if it repeats year after year, it compounds quickly. The bigger threat to physical isn't the pressing plant anyway - it's publishers shipping discs that are little more than download keys in a box, and shrinking shelf space as fewer shops bother stocking games at all. A disc that doesn't contain the game kills the resale logic far more effectively than any factory cut.

Sony pushing back on the 90 percent story is genuinely good news, because it means the disc business is still worth defending publicly. The day that stops being true, we won't need a misread quote to tell us. Until then, I'll keep buying the version I can hand to a friend.

Image: Kent Madsen / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,_Blu-ray,_Backside.jpg