Sony PlayStation Store (Image: Sony)
Ken Kutaragi, the engineer known as the “Father of PlayStation,” says he sympathizes with players upset over Sony’s plan to stop producing game discs, but he believes the company is making the right call.
Kutaragi, who led development of the original PlayStation, the PS2 and the PS3, weighed in during an interview with Video Games Chronicle at the Game Republic New Horizons conference in Middlesbrough, England, earlier this month. His comments add a prominent voice to a debate that has divided the PlayStation community since Sony announced in July that it would end disc production for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028.
“I understand that physical discs have become a metaphor for ‘owning’ games,” Kutaragi told VGC. Still, he said he did not consider continued disc production economically reasonable, and he described much of the resistance to a disc-free PlayStation as “a mentality issue.”
The former Sony Computer Entertainment chairman and group CEO pointed to how much the technology landscape has shifted since his tenure. He noted that while the PS2 and PS3 had network capabilities, online connectivity was far less common back then. Comparing consoles to smartphones, he argued that today’s always-connected users no longer expect physical media because they trust that their content will stay with them.
Kutaragi, who left Sony in 2007, also suggested the company’s current leadership views PlayStation differently than he did, noting that Sony Interactive Entertainment has hired many people from Gaikai and other streaming businesses. In his view, the company may now see PlayStation as much more a content terminal than a dedicated game console. He predicted the shift long ago, telling GameSpot in 2006 that digital distribution would eventually make discs unnecessary.
Sony has cited consumer behavior as the driving force behind its decision. Digital downloads accounted for 82 percent of PS4 and PS5 full-game sales in the April-to-June quarter, and physical software brought in $130 million (¥20.5 billion) of the $3.3 billion (¥526.6 billion) Sony earned from game software, less than 4 percent. During the company’s July 31 earnings call, CFO Lin Tao said Sony would proceed cautiously despite the backlash. By then, an online petition urging Sony to keep physical games had passed 352,000 signatures.
After the initial uproar, Sony told partners that third-party publishers could still place disc orders ahead of the cutoff, allowing some physical copies to remain on shelves into 2028 until stock runs out, according to a report by Game File‘s Stephen Totilo.
Kutaragi is the third former PlayStation executive to weigh in. Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, said in August that he plays entirely digitally and doesn’t see the loss of discs as a major problem. Shawn Layden, former chairman of Sony Worldwide Studios, was less sanguine, calling a disc-free PlayStation depressing but fixable if Sony licensed its disc-pressing process to outside manufacturers, as Microsoft does for Xbox.
The ownership question has also reached Capitol Hill. On Oct. 15, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) announced the Power to the Players Act, which would direct the Federal Trade Commission to treat purchased games as owned rather than licensed. The proposal would also require online games to receive an offline mode before their servers shut down, though it has not yet been formally introduced.
Sony’s own legal stance complicates Kutaragi’s argument that players trust their digital libraries. Responding to a class-action lawsuit in California federal court in August, the company said reasonable consumers know they don’t own digital downloads, only a revocable license to play them.
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