Sony DADC’s Dietmar Tanzer says PlayStation discs fall to 10% by 2028

Sony’s disc business is not just shrinking. It is being actively unwound at the factory level, according to Dietmar Tanzer, president of Sony DADC. Tanzer told ORF Salzburg that Sony’s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, and that about half of those discs are for PlayStation. The kicker is what Sony expects to do with that capacity by 2028: it plans to make only 10% of that volume for PlayStation.

That production math drives the next move. Sony is planning to retrain all 300 employees at Thalgau to work on optical microlenses instead, rather than continuing to make game discs at the old scale. In other words, the PlayStation disc is not merely “declining.” Sony is treating it as an operational end-of-life event, with people and equipment repurposed rather than left to drift.

If you are a decision-maker at any media or hardware company, the broader story here is how fast the market declared a winner. The “video game disc is dead” framing may sound dramatic, but the operational detail Tanzer provided points to a long runway of planning. Sony has been planning to kill the disc format for some time, and the Thalgau pivot is essentially the final implementation phase. A factory that ships hundreds of thousands of units per day cannot be idled casually, and “making fewer discs” is not the same thing as “transitioning to a new optical product line.” Sony is doing the hard work of redeploying labor and process expertise.

The Thalgau site matters because, per the report, Thalgau is not just another factory on a spreadsheet. It is where Sony’s disc-making division is headquartered, and it appears to be Sony’s only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. That detail raises the stakes inside Sony’s org chart and for any board watching the P&L. When the headquarters site pivots, it usually signals that the decision is settled enough to absorb business disruption and retraining costs, rather than hoping the transition can be delayed.

There is also an incentives story hidden in the numbers. A factory producing 600,000 discs daily, with half for PlayStation, implies that the company’s throughput and workflow have been optimized around disc characteristics and the downstream economics of physical distribution. Dropping to 10% of that volume in 2028 means Sony will not just reduce demand; it will have to reconfigure its production schedule, supply chain relationships, and internal capability development. Retraining 300 employees to make optical microlenses instead is the sign that Sony is trying to preserve valuable optics-related manufacturing know-how while escaping a product category that is losing its center.

Why “optical microlenses”? Because optical manufacturing is not the same as “game disc assembly,” even if the word “optical” keeps it in the family. Microlenses can play a role in a variety of optical systems, and the key point for executives is the direction of travel: Sony is moving from a consumer entertainment media format toward components and enabling optics work. This is the kind of shift that often matters more to engineering teams and operations leaders than to marketing, but the ripple effects hit financial planning, headcount strategy, and long-term capex decisions.

There is also a governance and regulatory angle that tends to show up late in transitions like this. Sony DADC’s comments are attributed through a media report out of Austria, with Tanzer speaking to ORF Salzburg. When a major employer in a region retrains workers for a different manufacturing process, local outcomes become part of the narrative, whether the topic is labor policy, workforce development, or industrial strategy. Even if the source does not detail any government incentives or mandates, the public nature of the retraining plan suggests the pivot is significant enough to be tracked externally.

For peers, the second-order implication is blunt: physical media strategies can die on a timeline that is shorter than most people’s planning cycles. If Sony expects PlayStation disc output to be only 10% of a previously massive daily volume by 2028, then the decision is already locked into operational schedules years ahead. That puts pressure on anyone still investing in “last-mile” distribution capabilities, because the remaining capacity may become uneconomical faster than expected. Sony is effectively selling the message that when the market moves on from discs, the only question is how quickly the organization can convert its operational DNA to the next thing.