The video game disc is dead, and Sony’s been planning to kill it for a while, in accordance with a report out of Austria. The person who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg that the corporate’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs day-after-day, half of that are for PlayStation. However because it’ll solely be making 10 p.c of that quantity in 2028, it’s planning to retrain all 300 workers to work on optical microlenses as a substitute.
Thalgau isn’t simply one of Sony’s disc crops. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, and seems to be its solely remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in america for many years, initially in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, nevertheless it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Right this moment, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need assistance packaging and assembling headlights and the like as a substitute.
This transition didn’t occur in a single day. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 exhibits that the Thalgau plant was already engaged on microlenses as of then:
These lenses, too, are created utilizing discs:
ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to fabricate these microlenses, and that mass manufacturing might start “as early as subsequent 12 months.”
Microlenses are theoretically utilized in every kind of rising functions the place you would possibly wish to bend gentle, together with headsets, however it seems that Sony might cater to automakers right here, too. The pinnacle of Sony’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the instance of “a automotive flip sign that’s projected onto asphalt.”
All of that is to say: Sony didn’t make this choice in a rush, and it isn’t more likely to change its thoughts regardless of the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for many years, and it’s ripping off one final band-aid with PlayStation.
In accordance with Sony DADC’s web site, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs thus far — the overwhelming majority, 23 billion of them, have been made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.