Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden says Sony's plan to stop producing discs for new PlayStation games looks less like a philosophical stand against physical media and more like a hard business calculation.
Sony announced last week that new PlayStation game disc production will end in January 2028. In an interview with Eurogamer, Layden said he had no inside knowledge of the decision and left Sony in 2019, but described the move as "fairly dramatic" and said it may show the numbers no longer support manufacturing physical games for a shrinking part of the market.
"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]," Layden said. "What are disc sales compared to digital sales?"
That question feeds directly into the next PlayStation hardware cycle. Sony has not announced the PS6 or confirmed whether its next console will include a disc drive, but the 2028 cutoff makes the idea of a disc-free PlayStation generation much easier to imagine.
Layden says Sony has debated losing discs for years
Layden, who spent more than three decades at Sony and formerly led PlayStation Worldwide Studios, told Eurogamer that the company had been asked about dropping the disc drive for roughly 20 years. During his time at PlayStation, he said the answer depended partly on whether broadband access around the world was strong enough to carry the download experience for most customers.
He also framed the issue as a tipping-point problem. A company may still have players who depend on discs, but the business case changes if a smaller physical audience represents only a tiny part of revenue.
"At some point it just becomes obvious that we can't keep this whole thing running just for this very small slice of opportunity."
The caveat is important. Layden was not revealing Sony's PS6 plan, and he repeatedly made clear that he was speaking from outside the company. His comments are still useful because they describe the kind of internal logic PlayStation has wrestled with before: global internet access, manufacturing cost, retail demand and how much of the audience would be left behind.
Sony's official announcement said physical game disc production for all new games released on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Games already released on disc, or scheduled to release on disc before then, are not affected. New games after that point will be sold through PlayStation Store and retailers in digital formats only, according to PlayStation Blog.
The ownership debate is not cooling down
Layden pushed back on the idea that second-hand sales are the main reason for the shift. He said used games still exist but are no longer material enough to drive a decision of this size, especially after years of digital sales growth and declining brick-and-mortar retail.
The PlayStation disc cutoff has already drawn criticism from creators and preservation-minded players. Hideo Kojima recently called PlayStation's digital future "sad" and "frightening", warning that a deeper move toward streaming could leave access to games dependent on remote servers.
Layden's view is more corporate than emotional, but it lands in the same unsettled moment. If PlayStation stops making new discs in 2028, the PS6 question becomes less about whether Sony can build a disc-drive model and more about why it would build one for a format it is preparing to leave behind.