Sony Polls Studios After It Moves to Kill Discs

Sony is polling game developers about physical disc sales after locking in a January 2028 cutoff for new PlayStation games. The company has not confirmed the survey. Tom, the Moore’s Law Is Dead creator, said on Broken Silicon that contacts described it as bigger than almost any questionnaire Sony has sent before, with a sideways item on how physical games are sold.

Sony Is Asking the Studios, Not the Players

Tom’s claim, aired in late September 2026, is the first sign that PlayStation is putting the disc fight in front of the companies that still have to budget for a pressing. He said the form tried, “in a not-direct way,” to ask whether there is a problem with how Sony sells games physically. He tied that to Marvel’s Wolverine still moving boxed copies, and guessed a pile of bad answers might force “some sort of mea culpa.” Sony has posted nothing that matches that description.

A form sent to studios is a partner document. It is not a poll of the people who still walk into a shop for a box. That gap is the whole fight. Collector publishers spent July saying they live on pressed discs. Digital Foundry’s John Linneman said after gamescom 2026 that publishers he heard from “were largely very upset,” and that a lot of those companies still see most of their return, “in fact, the majority,” through physical sales. Sony’s own books already treat discs as a thin slice. The people being asked, if Tom is right, are the ones for whom that slice is still the business.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The cutoff: On July 1, 2026, PlayStation said new games on its consoles would end disc production in January 2028, with older disc titles left in place.
• The public line: On July 31, 2026, chief financial officer Lin Tao told investors Sony would “cautiously move this forward” and was not seeing a hit to the business.
• The launch data: Insomniac’s Marvel’s Wolverine, out September 15, 2026, still took a real share of its opening money from boxed copies, per Alinea Analytics.
• The rumor: Tom said in September that Sony had sent developers an unusually long survey with a physical-sales question. Sony has not said that survey exists.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The form itself: No studio has published the questions, and no PlayStation channel has acknowledged a disc survey.
• A climbdown: Nothing in Sony’s posted policy retracts the January 2028 date for new games.
• Who was asked: Tom did not name the studios, so it is unclear whether first-party teams, third-party publishers, or both received it.

Hope that this is the start of a reversal sits on a single podcast account. The written record still points the other way.

22.9% of Wolverine’s Launch Money Came From Discs

Marvel’s Wolverine is the awkward data point sitting on Sony’s desk. Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, estimated the PS5 exclusive sold about 1.9 million copies in three days and took in more than $130 million. About 1 million of those copies were digital pre-orders before launch. Physical editions still accounted for 22.9% of that revenue.

That is not a niche. It is also not the mix Insomniac used to print. Alinea’s earlier cuts put Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 at 35% of PS5 revenue from physical, Ghost of Yotei at a 37.6% physical split, and Astro Bot at 46% of sales from discs. Wolverine launched as a fully playable disc, not a code in a box. Senior project director Jess Reiner-Reed said in August that the game “will be fully playable on the disc when you purchase it,” while still pushing players toward the day-one patch.

PHYSICAL SHARE ON RECENT SONY HITS

The trend line inside Sony’s own catalogue is the part that matters for a 2028 cutoff. A first-party tentpole can still mint tens of millions of dollars from boxed copies and, in the same breath, lean harder on digital than the last few PlayStation hits did. Tom read Wolverine’s boxed sales as a reason for Sony to blink. The same numbers also show why a platform holder can tell investors discs are already a rounding error while a studio still has a pressing to schedule.

The Collector Houses Still Need a Pressed Disc

The companies that spoke up in early July were not arguing about Sony’s quarterly mix. They were arguing about a format they still sell as the product. Iam8bit, Limited Run Games, Silver Lining Interactive, Lost in Cult, Atari, and Strictly Limited all went on the record within days of the blog post. Their businesses are steelbooks, art cards, wholesale reorders, and a shelf copy that works without a store login.

Iam8bit co-owners Jon Gibson and Amanda White did not hedge.

We are profoundly disappointed by Sony’s decision to suspend physical games production in 2028. Physical games are vital to games preservation, ownership, and consumer choice, values that have guided iam8bit since our first physical release in 2016. Our commitment to these values remains unchanged. Long live physical media.

Jon Gibson and Amanda White, co-owners and co-creative directors, iam8bit

Limited Run said it understood “why the math points that way for a platform holder at that scale,” then said it had spent a decade proving people still want to hold their games and own them outright. The company added that it is not slowing down on physical editions. Silver Lining founder Luke Keighran has described physical as a highly profitable lane, with a wholesale market as well as retail, and said catalogue copies still follow a digital hit. Lost in Cult, which presses indie games and art books, said it was “deeply saddened” and would keep preserving games “for as long as we can.”

WHO STILL HAS SKIN IN THE DISC

• Iam8bit: Premium collector bundles and unique disc art, calling physical copies vital to ownership and preservation.
• Limited Run Games: Limited collector runs; it accepts Sony’s math at platform scale and says demand for a shelf copy has not gone away.
• Silver Lining Interactive: Manchester publisher that often presses physical after a digital launch and still calls that lane profitable.
• Lost in Cult: Art-first indie physical editions, framing the cutoff as a preservation loss.

Frank Cifaldi, director of the Video Game History Foundation, cut against the panic from the archive side. He said museums have been preparing for this, because most games of the last two decades were never pressed, and a day-one patch often means the disc is not the game people actually played. He still wants trade groups to give archives a legal way to keep digital-only work playable. That is a different fight from the one collector publishers are in. They need a plant that will still stamp a new SKU in 2028. Sony’s survey, if it is real, is aimed at that plant’s customers, not at Cifaldi’s stacks.

What Lin Tao Locked In on the July Call

The earnings Q&A on July 31, 2026, is still the last on-the-record policy. Tao, speaking through an interpreter after results for the three months ended June 30, said Sony had announced the January 2028 stop “one-and-a-half years ahead.” She named “digitalisation of contents overall” as the biggest reason, and said the firm had thought it through.

And so, when we think about the future, 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. To this decision we have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forward 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.

Lin Tao, chief financial officer, Sony, Q1 investor Q&A

Pressed on whether the backlash had shown up in the numbers, she said Sony was “not seeing any impact on our business as of now,” and that because so much content sales were already digital, she did not see a negative hit from ending the disc. That is the sentence a survey has to beat. A questionnaire to developers can be due diligence, a partner-relations exercise, or ammo for the next call. It is not, by itself, a new date.

PLAYSTATION SOFTWARE IN Q1

• Total software: ¥526.6 billion ($3.2 billion) for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.
• Digital software and add-ons: ¥485.2 billion ($3 billion).
• Physical software: ¥20.5 billion ($128 million).
• First-party units: Down from 6.9 million to 6 million, while Games & Network Services sales were almost flat at ¥937.1 billion ($5.8 billion).

Sid Shuman, senior director of content communications at Sony Interactive Entertainment, had already written the consumer version on July 1. New games after the cutoff would be sold on PlayStation Store and at retailers “in digital formats only.” Games that shipped on disc before January 2028 would not be pulled. The blog called that “a natural direction” because “the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs.” Workers at Sony’s Austrian disc plant have been described as retraining around optical microlenses, a sign the hardware of pressing is being asked to do other work even while older catalogue discs can still be reordered.

A Hundred Hits Became Seven

U.S. retail tracking is the coldest version of the same story. Mat Piscatella, a senior director and video game industry advisor at Circana, posted Circana Retail Tracking Service figures in July after a Wolverine trailer filled with protest comments. In the first half of 2008, 100 PlayStation games sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the United States. In the first half of 2026, seven did. None of those seven reached 275,000 U.S. discs. In the week ending July 11, 2026, only two PlayStation games cleared 10,000 physical units.

U.S. PLAYSTATION DISCS OVER 100,000

Piscatella’s wider cut had U.S. physical software at 37 million units in the 12 months ending June 2026, across all platforms, with recent dollar growth coming from Nintendo rather than PlayStation. He has also said retailers pulled back on orders years ago so they would not sit on unsold hits, and that fewer games arriving on disc plus weaker averages is a “death spiral.” Commenting on a trailer, he added, is cheap.

That U.S. chart is why Sony can tell a room of investors the format is already gone, and why a British or European collector shop can still feel the cutoff as a theft. Circana does not track the world. Silver Lining’s wholesale lane and iam8bit’s bundles do not show up in a 100,000-unit U.S. filter. Ubisoft chief executive Yves Guillemot told his own earnings call he did not think scrapping discs would “disturb the industry too much,” pointing at PC’s digital shift. Linneman’s gamescom readout sits on the other side of that split. A developer survey is how a platform holder asks which of those two rooms its partners live in.

Retailers Get a Code in a Box

Tao also used the July call to talk about stores. She said retail partners had mattered for 30 years, that Sony had flagged the end of disc production early so it could hear them, and that North America was already selling packages with a code and no disc. The “win-win” she described is a box that still hangs on a peg, stuffed with a voucher. That is the product Take-Two has already used for Grand Theft Auto VI’s so-called physical edition. It keeps a shelf presence. It does not keep a resale copy, an offline install, or a pressed master that a museum can file.

Microsoft, in the same stretch of calendar, has been asking Xbox Insiders whether the next console should keep a disc drive. Sony’s rumored form goes to developers. One company is asking the people who buy the hardware. The other is asking the people who would still have to pay to stamp a SKU. That is not a small difference in who holds leverage. It is also why a loud “no disc, no buy” campaign can fill a State of Play chat in September and still not be the audience on Sony’s questionnaire.

Code-in-a-box is the compromise that lets GameStop hang something and lets Sony stop running a disc line for new releases. Collector publishers have already said they will try key cards, cartridges on other platforms, or whatever else keeps a physical object in the market. Strictly Limited’s Sascha Hoffmann-Nowak called physical editions “highly relevant” for ownership and said the firm would keep releasing PS5 discs “for as long as it’s possible.” The open question a developer survey can actually answer is how long those partners will fund a pressing once Sony’s plant is no longer in the new-release business.

January 2028 Has Not Moved

Put the rumor next to the paper. PlayStation’s blog still says new games go digital-only from January 2028. Tao still said the firm would move that plan forward, and that she did not see a business hit from doing so. Wolverine still took 22.9% of its opening revenue from discs, on a fully playable pressing, while sitting below the physical share of Sony’s last few tentpoles. Collector houses still say the format is their product. U.S. tracking still says a 100,000-unit PlayStation disc is now a rare event.

If Sony sent the long survey Tom described, it sent it to the companies that would have to keep writing checks for glass and art and freight. It did not send it to the people shouting in a livestream. A partner questionnaire can surface a cost Sony had not priced, or it can produce a stack of answers the next earnings call can wave at. It cannot, on present evidence, move a date that is already on the blog.