Less than a week after announcing that it is ending the concept of physical game releases on PlayStation from January 2028 onwards, Sony has already begun repurposing the factories where physical game releases were produced. As caught by The Verge, the head of Sony DADC (the company’s disc-making operations), Dietmar Tanzer, told Austrian publication ORF Salzburg that Sony’s Thalgau plant will now only produce 10 percent of its previous volume in 2028.
The plant currently produces 600,000 discs on a daily basis, half of which are for PlayStation games. With the rest of the factory getting repurposed over time, the 300 employees working at the plant will be retrained to instead work on the production of microlenses.
While far from a surprising move, the report also confirms that Sony has been working on this strategy for quite some time. Decisions like this, which have major implications for essentially the entire industry, aren’t often made overnight, after all.
Thalgau is also noted as being the base of operations for Sony’s disc production. While the company previously manufactured discs for US release in facilities set up in Terre Haute, Indiana, operations were eventually moved to Thalgau in 2022. The company also had another plant in New Jersey, which was shuttered in 2011. Owing to the long life of the Indiana-based facility, which now works on packaging and assembling automobile parts like headlights, it helped produce 23 billion of the 26.4 billion discs produced by Sony.
In its announcement, Sony had said that the move to entirely digital game releases from 2028 onwards is a response to the industry generally shifting to prefer digital releases over physical copies. The company noted that this has been the case for the entertainment industry as a whole and hasn’t just been limited to games.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs,” said the company. “This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
The announcement was seen as a good thing by the Tokyo Stock Exchange, leading to Sony’s stock price going up by around 3.2 percent earlier this week. This rise in stock price was considered especially noteworthy since the market as a whole has been quite “challenging”, with the technology stocks in the Nikkei 225 index falling by 1 percent.
Ampere’s Piers Harding-Rolls believes that this move to an all-digital future gives us a sneak peak at Sony’s plans for its next-gen console hardware. It is likely that the company will be looking forward to cutting costs associated with including a disc drive with the PS6. He also noted that this indicates a 2028 release window for the PS6.
“Almost certainly guarantees that the PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest. Ampere’s current expectation is a launch at the end of 2028,” he wrote. “At a minimum, the standard version of a PS6 will not include a physical media disc drive.”
