It now seems highly unlikely that Sony will be dissuaded from ending their PlayStation disc business.
A report from Austria has revealed that Sony is ending disc manufacturing in their Thalgau plant. This facility makes 600,000 discs annually, making it the largest Sony factory for that purpose. PlayStation discs account for half of those discs.
The Thalgau factory is transitioning to building optical microlenses, which can be as complex as what fabs do to make integrated circuits. You can learn more about them here and here.
And yes, this report also confirms Sony is winding down optical disc manufacturing outside of gaming, for applications such as home video, data storage, etc. After over 20 years of Blu-Ray and over a decade of 4K UHD, both formats Sony created and patented, they have raised the white flag on optical disc media.
We would be remiss not to point out that this move has been partly caused by optical discs, even high capacity formats like 4K UHD, being rendered obsolete by SSDs and their fast read speeds. Sony made this a selling point of the PlayStation 5 itself from the very start.
