Ken Kutaragi Calls Physical Discs a 'Metaphor' for Owning Games
PlayStation's founder says there's no economic case left for game discs, though he claims to understand why collectors are furious about losing them.
Credit where it is due, grudgingly: Ken Kutaragi has never been a man who confused sentiment with strategy, and he is not about to start now that he no longer has a PlayStation division to run. The founder of the platform, former Sony chairman, and the engineer most responsible for convincing a generation that a console could double as a cultural statement, has weighed in on the slow strangling of physical media, and he has done so with the breezy candor of a man who no longer has to watch the sales charts.
As reported by Polygon, Kutaragi argues there is simply no reason, as a businessman, to keep producing discs, though he says he understands why players are upset about losing them. That is the official, carefully temperate version of the remark, and on its own it reads like the sort of thing an elder statesman says to sound gracious while the decision has already been made several boardrooms above him.
The uncut version, carried by the channel Sh00ter Stu in a video titled "PlayStation Founder Just INSULTED Every Physical Game Collector", is considerably less gracious. According to that channel's account of the interview, Kutaragi described wanting physical discs as a "mentality issue," called the disc itself nothing more than a "metaphor for owning games," and insisted that keeping disc production alive is not "economically reasonable." He reportedly reached for a comparison to phone apps to illustrate how he believes ownership should now work, and the channel's breakdown has him landing, eventually, on an all-digital future with streaming as the destination everyone is being quietly walked toward.
One appreciates the honesty even while despising the conclusion. A metaphor is what you call something when you have already decided it no longer matters, and a man who spent a career insisting that hardware and format were the whole point of the exercise now describes the object itself as decorative sentiment. You will notice that nobody at Sony has used the word "metaphor" to describe the box art, the manual, or the thirty dollars less you used to pay for the thing secondhand.
This is, at least, consistent with where Sony has been signaling for some time, a drift this site already clocked when Nintendo chose, for now, to hold the opposite line. It is worth remembering, too, that the same executive's name sits attached to a console launch, the PS3's, that collectors still bring up as a cautionary tale about Sony's instincts for telling the market what it is supposed to want. Nostalgia, it turns out, is only a metaphor when it is inconvenient to the balance sheet.