According to a report out of Austria, the video game disc has run out and Sony has been planning to get rid of it for some time. Dietmar Tanzer, president of Sony DADC, the man who leads Sony’s discmaking operations, told ORF Salzberg The company’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it will be able to make only 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it plans to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses.
thalgau bus is not One Of Sony’s disc plants. This is where the disc-manufacturing division is headquartered, and appears to be its only wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana, and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help with packaging, assembling headlights, and more.
This change did not happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses by that time:
Those lenses are also made using discs:
ORF Salzberg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million in manufacturing these microlenses, and mass production could begin “early next year”.
Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears Sony may be meeting automakers’ needs here too. The head of Sony’s micro-optics division gave ORF Salzberg Example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto the asphalt”.
All this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision hastily, and it’s unlikely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been ceasing disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s slapping one last Band-Aid on it with the PlayStation.
According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced more than 26.4 billion discs to date – the majority of them, 23 billion, were made in Terre Haute, Indiana, between 1983 and 2022.
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