Following Sony’s announcement from earlier this month that it is ending the production of PlayStation discs from January 2028, the company has allegedly implemented strict social media guidelines for its employees regarding the subject. According to former Santa Monica Studio writer Alanah Pearce, Sony was seemingly aware that its announcement would spark some backlash, and wanted to curtail the potential PR harm through these strict guidelines.
“Sony already knew everyone would be pissed off – they knew this,” said Pearce in a video which you can check out below. “People working within PlayStation first-party studios told me Sony had the strictest social media guidelines for this particular thing they’ve ever seen issued.”
While the company issuing social media and communications guidelines to its employees isn’t exactly new, Pearce said that this newest one was among the strictest ones Sony has implemented.
“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 the game was announced.”
“But in this instance, it’s 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.”
Precise details about these social media guidelines are currently unknown. However, it likely involves refusing to engage on the subject of PlayStation discs from 2028 onwards, since the subject hasn’t really been brought up by any of the game developers working at the company’s first-party studios.
In its announcement, Sony said that the decision to end the production of PlayStation discs was made to align the company with modern consumer spending trends.
“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today.”
Interestingly, the company had seemingly already begun to slow down the production of discs at its Thalgau plant, with plans for it to only produce 10 percent of what it used to. Currently, the plant produces 600,000 PlayStation discs on a daily basis. The rest of the factory is getting repurposed to produce microlenses, and its 300 employees are slated to start training for the new production decision.
While there has been plenty of consumer backlash against Sony’s decisions, analysts have noted that the company is unlikely to reverse its plans. Among these is Kantan Labs CEO Dr. Serkan Toto, who said that, while he sympathizes with fans of physical media, “Sony will not reverse this decision. They, of course, knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.”
Circana’s Mat Piscatella has also recently brought up the fact that the volume of physical game sales these days has been quite low.
