Sony Will "Cautiously" Move Forward on Its Digital-Only Plans

Sony is standing defiant in its decision to stop printing physical PlayStation discs from January 2028, vowing to "cautiously move forward" with its plans.

In its most recent earnings call, which Kotaku reported on, the company was quizzed on the widespread backlash to its decision to pursue a digital-only future. In its response, Lin Tao, Sony's chief financial officer, said that while the company understands that gamers have strong "emotions" regarding the medium, the data was clear on where people are buying games.

"It's not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalisation is progressing," said Tao, before putting a full stop to any speculation the company might retreat from the decision: "[...] we came to this conclusion, and we're going to cautiously move this forward."

Discourse online remains tense and vocal against the decision. Calls for a boycott of PlayStation continue to escalate, and a separate petition to the company keeps growing, with almost 355,000 signatures, an uptick of over 10,000 since we reported on this issue last week.

When asked about the impact on retailers, Tao was fairly coy in her response, stating that the company will "have a thorough dialogue [with retailers] so that we can end up in a win-win situation," and did not think that the physical disc was a differentiator between a PlayStation and a PC.

In the same earnings call, Sony also confirmed it has enough "memory necessary to meet" sales, and that profitability for the PS5 series of consoles will not change this financial year. This is important, as Microsoft had argued publicly a couple of months back that the cost of consoles is hurting its bottom line, with Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty stating in an Xbox Wire article that the cost of components is only going up, warning component costs are expected to hit more than five times what they were two years ago.

Leaked bills of materials have shown that the next PlayStation is rumoured to cost Sony at least US$1,000 to produce, and with the ongoing component crisis plaguing the industry at large, it doesn't bode well for the retail price of Sony's next console.