PlayStation’s 2028 Disc Shutdown Is “Dramatic,” Says Ex-Sony Boss Shawn Layden
Former PlayStation Worldwide Studios boss Shawn Layden says he had zero advance warning that Sony would end physical disc manufacturing for new games starting in January 2028, calling the company’s own decision “a fairly dramatic” one despite believing the underlying math is simple.
Sony confirmed the shift in a PlayStation Blog post on July 1, with senior director of content communications Sid Shuman writing that the move reflects how “this transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.” Games already released or scheduled before the cutoff are unaffected; everything after will ship only as digital downloads through the PlayStation Store or as code-in-box retail products.
Layden: Sony’s Disc Call Is “A Straight Spreadsheet Decision”
Speaking to Eurogamer, Layden — who ran PlayStation Worldwide Studios before leaving Sony in 2019 after 32 years — framed the shutdown as a numbers exercise rather than a philosophical one. “If you look at any decision to discontinue a product or a feature or model or what have you, largely it’s a straight spreadsheet [decision],” he said, pointing to the long-term climb of digital sales against physical.
He recalled being asked about killing the disc drive constantly during his tenure. Layden says he was apparently asked about it “every year for the last 20 years.” His old answer always hinged on infrastructure: he told Eurogamer he wanted to be “comfortable enough to believe that worldwide, broadband throughput is good enough to support that download experience, good enough to reach the majority of customers.”
“I Had No Idea It Was Going To Happen”
Despite spending three decades inside PlayStation’s leadership, Layden says the timing of Sony’s announcement caught him off guard. “I had no idea it was going to happen,” Layden says. “I don’t necessarily agree with it but I don’t work in the business any more. Maybe it’s just too prohibitively expensive to stamp out discs.”
He also pointed to a global customer base that Sony has historically been careful about, noting that physical discs mattered for players without reliable broadband. According to a report cited by GamingBolt, Layden argued that “PlayStation had a wider global fanbase, and not just in the numbers, but in the reach, because Sony Corp had reach all over the world,” citing military personnel on bases without internet access as an example of who could be left behind by an all-digital future.
Thalgau Factory Cuts Output From 600,000 Discs a Day to Just 10%
The physical wind-down is already visible on the factory floor. Sony’s Thalgau plant in Austria — the company’s last wholly owned disc-manufacturing facility — currently produces roughly 600,000 optical discs daily, with half of that volume going toward PlayStation titles, according to Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer as reported by Engadget. Sony DADC CEO Dietmar Tanzer expects disc production to drop to 10 percent of the plant’s current output in 2028.
Rather than shutter the site, Sony is retraining the roughly 300 workers there to build optical microlenses for headsets and automotive lighting, a shift the company has reportedly backed with tens of millions of euros in new investment, per the same Engadget report.
PS6 Speculation Grows Around a Disc-Less, Pricier Console
Layden believes the disc shutdown telegraphs where PlayStation’s next console is headed. He recounted that while at Sony, dropping the disc drive was debated internally for roughly a year, with the sticking point always being global broadband readiness, as reported by TechRadar. He now suspects that tipping point has arrived, and that a future PS6 base model may skip the drive entirely.
Analysts have reached similar conclusions independently of Layden’s remarks. Ampere Analysis’s Piers Harding-Rolls, cited by GamingBolt, said the move “almost certainly guarantees that the PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest,” adding that “at a minimum, the standard version of a PS6 will not include a physical media disc drive.”
Read also: EU Commissioner: Bloc Can’t Stop Sony Ending Disc-Based Games
What ANZ Collectors and Trade-In Shoppers Stand to Lose
For Kiwi and Australian players, the story is bigger than nostalgia. Both markets lean on a robust secondhand and trade-in economy at chains like EB Games and JB Hi-Fi to soften the cost of new releases — a system that only works while fresh discs keep entering circulation.
Once every new PlayStation title from 2028 onward ships digital-only or as a code-in-box, that resale pipeline effectively dries up for future releases, even as older disc-based games remain tradeable. Combined with rising console hardware costs already pushing PS5 pricing upward in several regions, the shift adds fresh uncertainty for budget-conscious gamers in a part of the world where broadband quality and data caps still vary widely outside major cities.
Sony has not indicated any plans to reverse the January 2028 cutoff, and has separately confirmed it will keep offering reprints of pre-2028 disc titles on request, according to reporting from Game File relayed by Gadget Review. For now, Layden’s read stands as the most prominent insider reaction to a decision that, by his own account, was made without consulting the executives who spent decades defending the format.
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