Digital Media's Triumph Sony's Move to Abandon Physical Media

TapTechNews June 30th, in recent years, digital media has been showing a rapid growth trend globally. No matter it's games, movies or TV, most media content nowadays is consumed by people in digital form. This transformation took a relatively long time in the game industry, but now more and more signs indicate that physical media is about to disappear.

According to recent developments, Sony might be preparing to completely abandon physical media. After a large-scale layoff involving important departments, a report pointed out that Sony will gradually stop producing optical storage media.

Analysts had previously predicted that in the next two generations of consoles, PlayStation and Xbox will fully shift to digital. However, this change seems to come even faster than expected.

According to Mainichi, Sony laid off 250 people in its writable media business department. Although no more details were disclosed, the report said that the decline in the demand for physical media was the main reason for this layoff.

The report also emphasized that Sony ultimately plans to stop producing storage media such as Blu-ray discs. Interestingly, this is also the standard format currently used by all PS5 games.

Now that Sony is overall abandoning Blu-ray discs, then this decision will soon have an impact on the game business. PS5 has launched a digital-only version model, highlighting PlayStation's focus on the digital market.

Xbox has recognized this and has focused most of its energy on subscription services, cloud gaming, and the like.

Previously, Xbox's physical game department has also experienced a similar layoff. Looking to the future, Sony may outsource its physical media business, and it's just a matter of time before digital media takes over the market completely.

TapTechNews has noticed that an increasing number of studios have chosen to completely cancel the release of physical versions, and the recently released Hellblade 2 is a typical example. This might be bad news for players who like to collect physical games, but it seems that this trend is irreversible.