Sony Imposes Strictest Ever Social Media Guidelines on Staff Amid PS5 Disc Backlash

Sony has issued what staff at its first-party studios describe as the strictest social media guidelines they have ever seen, according to former Santa Monica Studio employee Alanah Pearce, in the wake of its decision to stop producing physical game discs from 2028. The claim, made in a YouTube video, offers an explanation for why the company has stayed publicly silent through weeks of backlash.

If accurate, the guidelines were drafted before the reaction landed, not in response to it.

What Pearce Said

Pearce, who also worked as a writer on the upcoming God of War: Laufey, said the instruction went out because Sony knew exactly what was coming.

“People working at PlayStation first-party studios told me that Sony had the strictest social media guidelines for this particular thing that they’ve ever seen issued,” she said. “Sony does somewhat regularly tell employees what they can or can’t say about certain things. I was under a lot of guidelines when I was working on God of War: Laufey. I still am, and they did send me guidelines regarding what I could say on the day that the game was announced.”

The distinction she drew is one of degree. “In this instance, it is apparently the strictest the employees I spoke to have ever seen regarding public communications. They would only have done this if they knew it was going to be an enormous PR issue. This is no surprise to them.”

That timing is the substantive point. Guidelines of that severity, prepared alongside the announcement rather than after it, indicate the company modelled the reaction accurately and chose to absorb it rather than soften the decision.

Weeks of Silence

Sony announced plans to cease manufacturing physical media in January 2028 earlier this month, and the reaction has been sustained. It has been described as one of the biggest and longest-running backlashes in nearly two decades of PlayStation coverage, and the company has continued posting on social media without addressing the subject directly at any point.

The disc decision is not happening in isolation either. Grand Theft Auto 6, one of the biggest releases of the year, currently has no plans for a physical release at all, which pushes the same all-digital direction from the publisher side rather than the platform holder’s.