Sony Gagged Staff Before Killing PlayStation Discs, Dev Says

Sony saw the anger coming. According to a new claim from a former God of War developer, the company braced for it by locking down its own staff, handing them the strictest social media guidelines they had ever been given so no one would talk about the decision to end PlayStation discs.

The claim comes from Alanah Pearce, a writer on God of War Laufey, who laid it out in a new YouTube video. According to IGN, Pearce said colleagues at PlayStation's first-party studios told her the restrictions around the disc announcement were the most stringent they had seen, a sign that Sony expected serious blowback.

"Sony already knew everyone would be pissed off."

— Alanah Pearce

Pearce said Sony does sometimes tell staff what they can and cannot say publicly, and that she worked under her own set of guidelines on God of War Laufey. This time was different. The people she spoke to described the communications rules as the strictest they had encountered, which she read as proof the company knew what was coming.

"They would only have done this if they knew it was going to be an enormous PR issue. This is no surprise to them."

— Alanah Pearce

The controversy traces back to July 1, when Sony announced it would stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games from January 2028. After that date, new releases sell only as digital purchases on the PlayStation Store and at retailers. Games already out, or arriving before the cutoff, keep their disc versions.

In its blog post, Sony framed the move as following its customers rather than pushing them. Senior communications director Sid Shuman wrote that consumer habits have shifted far enough that the format no longer makes sense to keep. Sony has pointed to downloads making up about 78 percent of game sales in 2025 to back the shift.

"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."

— Sid Shuman

The business case is straightforward. On a physical first-party game, Sony keeps roughly 65 percent of the price, with about 30 percent going to the retailer and the rest to manufacturing; on a digital sale of the same game, it keeps everything. For third-party discs it collects only a licensing fee, likely around 15 percent, while digital third-party sales pay far better. Analyst Daniel Ahmad has pegged Sony's take on a $70 third-party game at about $21 through the store, roughly double the retail cut.

The trend is just as one-sided. Full-game digital sales have climbed from under 10 percent before the PS4 era to about 80 percent on PlayStation today, and more than 90 percent on Xbox. Physical now accounts for only about 5 percent of Sony's total game software revenue, even though discs still make up a larger share of units. Roughly 70 million PS5 discs sold last year, down from 120 million in the console's launch year, and more than 30 percent of PS5s sold no longer have a disc drive at all. Ahmad also noted that half of the most-played PS5 games in May, Fortnite, GTA 5, and Call of Duty among them, do not ship on disc at all, and that Sony now earns more from add-ons and in-game purchases than from full-game sales of either kind.

None of that has cooled the reaction. A Change.org petition against the decision has passed 335,000 signatures, and campaigns under #BoycottSony and "No Disc, No Buy" keep circulating. On the PlayStation Blog, thousands of comments landed within hours, many repeating a version of the same line about owning nothing and being told to be happy about it. Some longtime buyers said the PS5 would be their last PlayStation, and others pointed to a recent move that pulled purchased movies from digital libraries as reason not to trust digital-only ownership. Calls to cancel PlayStation Plus in protest spread across social media.

Analysts do not expect any of it to work. Dr. Serkan Toto, who runs the consultancy Kantan Games, told IGN that Sony weighed the online reaction in advance and is simply waiting it out.

"I sympathize with physical media fans, but 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."

— Dr. Serkan Toto

Toto put the scale in perspective. Sony has more than 120 million active PlayStation users and around 50 million PlayStation Plus subscribers; even half a million cancellations, he argued, would amount to about 1 percent of that business, nowhere near enough to move the company.

Regulators offer little cover. EU Commissioner Michael McGrath, who handles consumer protection, said the bloc has thin legal grounds to force Sony to keep selling discs, calling distribution a matter of commercial and contractual freedom. His comments followed the European Commission's decision to pass on the Stop Killing Games push for preservation rules in favor of a voluntary code of conduct.

Sony has since softened the edges without changing course. Reporting indicated that disc-based games won't disappear immediately: publishers can still order disc runs, and retail boxes may ship with a digital code instead of a disc for a while. How long that middle phase lasts is unclear, and the direction is not in doubt.

The decision did not come from nowhere. Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has said the company was already weighing a disc-free future during his tenure, with digital already near 95 percent of revenue, and described the call as mostly a spreadsheet exercise. Rockstar had already confirmed GTA 6 would skip discs. The disc news landed the same day Sony revealed it was closing the PS3 and PS Vita stores, and the next hardware generation, expected to push consoles toward $1,000 as memory prices climb, looms over the timing.

The industry is not moving in lockstep. Nintendo still backs physical releases on Switch 2, even where they take the form of game-key cards, and it prices digital versions about $10 cheaper, a middle path Sony has shown no interest in.

Set the outrage aside for a moment. I said as much when the news first broke, and my read hasn't changed: this looks like floppy discs fading out, an organic retreat from a format rather than a betrayal of one, with a real upside where discs slowly become retro objects worth collecting. The part I'd actually fight over is narrower, because buying a game is quietly turning into buying a license to play, and we drift toward owning nothing digital without noticing the line we crossed. What I want is a side door: let publishers press their own disc runs or box a memory card in place of a disc, even if I don't expect Sony to build it.

The anger has splashed onto games that had nothing to do with the call. When Insomniac released the new Marvel's Wolverine cinematic trailer this month, the clip passed a million views in a day, but the top comments were about discs, not Logan. Fans turned Sony's "Play Has No Limits" slogan into "Play has limits," and the same wave hit posts for Marvel Tokon and PowerWash Simulator. Insomniac did not make the disc decision, and Marvel's Wolverine still ships with a disc in the box, one of the last first-party PlayStation games that will.

The pushback reached Sony's home market too, where Hideo Kojima reposted an old warning that a digital-only world can have its access switched off without notice, and developers inside the Sony group raised both preservation worries and a practical upside: dropping the disc build frees up about six weeks of extra polish time per game.

Read also, Sony's Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls runs a 72-hour open beta from July 24 to 27 on PS5 and PC, with 15 of the 20 launch fighters, ranked and casual online, training and local play, and the first three chapters of its Spider-Man-led Episode Mode, timed to land the same weekend Sony appears at San Diego Comic-Con and ten days before the August 6 release.