Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers A Giant Middle Finger

from the but-it’s-a-cautious-middle-finger dept

Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts nearly impossible. It makes gaming companies coming up with physical collectables to ship with their games a much more complicated prospect. And, as Sony itself likes to remind us over and over again, a game purchased digitally isn’t a game purchased at all, but rather a limited and temporary license to play a game for however long the publisher decides it should be available.

Given the backlash, it’s not all that surprising that some groups out there are attempting to organize against PlayStation usage blackouts in protest, though we’ll see how far they actually get with that. Given that Sony itself seems to be willing to give those angry customers a giant middle finger through it all, it’s hard to see it having much effect.

“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing, that’s the big factor,” Sony chief financial officer Lin Tao said through an interpreter during a Q&A on July 31. “It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing.”

“And so when we think about the future—and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this—and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward. And to this decision, we have received various opinions and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us. Games are loved by many people. It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories in many cases. And so we understand those emotions. We want to consider that. And in the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore.”

Now, I want to be clear that the word salad above is also the result of a translation. I have no idea how or if this would read any differently in its original language. But I sure would hope it would, because all those words above say absolutely nothing other than, “Yeah, we don’t care, we’re doing this anyway.”

It didn’t get any better when questions were asked from an investment standpoint. One analyst asked the perfectly reasonable question of what this was going to do to the downstream gaming retailers and Sony’s relationship with them. Tau’s answer was that those retailers can still sell mostly empty boxes.

In response, Tao pointed out that publishers will still be able to ship empty boxes with codes inside to stores in markets like North America and argued that PlayStation hardware will win on affordability.

“About the retailers, there are regional characteristics, and for each regional partner, we try to have a thorough dialogue so that we can end up in a win-win situation,” the CFO said.

No concern for preservation efforts. No concern for the 20% or so customers who still want to buy physical media. No concern for any brick and mortar retail partners and what will happen to them.

It appears Sony is going to listen to anyone but its own customers on this one.

Filed Under: backlash, discs, ownership, physical discs, playstation, video games

Companies: sony