Sony's Disc Purge Backfires as PlayStation Sales Slump

Kaz Hirai spent years telling Sony's own parent company that PlayStation answered to nobody, and the boast has aged into something between a confession and a warning. In an interview with Nikkei XTrend, recounted by the channel DreamcastGuy in a new video, Hirai recalled waving off instructions from Howard Stringer and the rest of Sony headquarters with the line, "What the headquarters says is irrelevant. We are PlayStation," delivered, the former president noted, with a laugh. It is the sort of swagger that reads charming when the division is winning. It reads differently now.

According to DreamcastGuy, the decision to end physical media has produced the sharpest backlash PlayStation has absorbed since the PS3 launch, a comparison that should sting anyone who remembers how long Sony spent apologizing for that console's price tag. Part of that backlash, per the channel, has taken the form of jailbreak and emulation projects pursued less out of technical curiosity than open spite, communities building by hand the disc compatibility Sony declined to ship. One does not organize that kind of labor over a feature nobody wanted.

The sales numbers, drawn from Circana and cited in the video, make the timing look worse than careless. Xbox hardware sales in the US are down 33 percent year to date through August, an all-time low for the brand, which is the kind of sentence I file away for later and savor only a little. But PlayStation hardware is down 25 percent over the same stretch, its weakest showing since 2013, and a company cannot point at a drowning rival as proof it can still swim.

Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, also quoted in the video, called the move away from discs "a significant brand hit" and a "reputation bite," and asked the question that actually matters here: if you do not own it, what exactly are you buying? DreamcastGuy's answer, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who has watched this pattern before, is that discs were never dropped because they lost money, only because they made some instead of all of it. "You will own nothing and be happy" is funnier as a joke than as a business plan.

There is also the matter, raised in the same video and consistent with prior reporting on the jailbreak scene, that PS5 may have been capable of disc-based backward compatibility with PS3, PS2, and PSone libraries all along, shelved in favor of selling those games again. Nobody at Sony has confirmed that, and nobody should treat it as settled until someone does. What is settled is simpler: a company that once declared itself accountable to no one is discovering what happens when the audience decides to return the favor.