While former boss of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios, Shawn Layden, has previously spoken about his thoughts on Sony’s decision to end PlayStation disc production, he has now offered some more insight into why he doesn’t ultimately agree with the decision.
In an interview with the Expansion Pass podcast, Layden spoke about how those who buy physical copies of games tend to be the most “faithful of the faithful players, who’ll show up to buy multiple copies of an individual game to keep in their collection.” Even if the people who buy physical copies of games amount to just 20 percent of a game’s overall sales, Layden believes that “that’s a super important 20%”.
Generally speaking, Layden also believes Sony’s decision is a “more insidious” one than it might appear on the surface, since one of the biggest questions that a focus on a digital-only future will raise is what customers are actually buying since they can no longer “own” a game.
“I don’t agree with that decision. But at the same time – I think this is probably the more insidious aspect to it – it changes the conversation from ‘do you own a game?’ Or ‘do you have access to a digital asset?'”
“If you can’t sell a thing, that means you don’t own a thing. And if you don’t own it, then what are you buying? If you’re buying access, that doesn’t quite sound as sexy, to be honest. And people, as people tend to do in their minds, they’ll game out the worst-case scenario. That’s a whole lot of brand hit and reputation bite that, as I said, I don’t have any visibility on the financials around it, but that’s a significant brand hit, and I hope it made sense to them.”
Layden has worked with Sony since 1987, and as such, he has plenty of experience in watching how market behavior has changed over time to favor digital distribution over physical copies. He spoke about this back in July, and went as far as to call Sony’s announcement a “fairly dramatic decision” that might have ultimately been “a straight spreadsheet” one.
“What are disc sales compared to digital sales? And I’m old enough to remember when digital sales were like 10 percent – I’m old enough to remember when digital sales were zero percent because we didn’t have a digital market! And that number just grew over time.”
Reflecting on his time at the company, Layden also spoke about how he was often asked when Sony would do away with the disc drives in its consoles. In the past, his answers typically noted that such a decision could only be feasible once worldwide Internet speeds make digital distribution viable. Looking forward, he foresees how PlayStation going fully digital might affect regions across the world that have poor Internet connections, pointing to military bases as a notable example. At the time, “the idea that they could still buy a PlayStation 4 game, throw it in a machine, and play was important. You don’t want to leave those people behind.”
