{"id":740101,"date":"2026-07-03T03:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T03:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740101\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T03:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T03:03:14","slug":"sonys-playstation-disc-factory-is-already-being-repurposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/740101\/","title":{"rendered":"Sony\u2019s PlayStation disc factory is already being repurposed"},"content":{"rendered":"

The video game disc is dead<\/a>, and Sony\u2019s been planning to kill it<\/a> for some time, according to a report out of Austria. The man who leads Sony\u2019s discmaking operations, Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer, told ORF Salzburg<\/a> that the company\u2019s Thalgau plant produces 600,000 discs every day, half of which are for PlayStation. But since it\u2019ll only be making 10 percent of that volume in 2028, it\u2019s planning to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlenses instead.<\/p>\n

Thalgau isn\u2019t just one of Sony\u2019s disc plants. It\u2019s where the disc-making division is headquartered<\/a>, and appears to be its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing facility. Sony made discs in the United States for decades, originally in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but it closed the latter plant in 2011<\/a> and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022<\/a>. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers<\/a> who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.<\/p>\n

This transition didn\u2019t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:<\/p>\n

Those lenses, too, are created using discs:<\/p>\n

ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested \u20ac30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin \u201cas early as next year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Microlenses are theoretically used in all kinds of emerging applications where you might want to bend light, including headsets, but it appears that Sony may cater to automakers here, too. The head of Sony\u2019s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of \u201ca car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this is to say: Sony didn\u2019t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn\u2019t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash<\/a>. It\u2019s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it\u2019s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.<\/p>\n

According to Sony DADC\u2019s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date \u2014 the vast majority, 23 billion of them<\/a>, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The video game disc is dead, and Sony\u2019s been planning to kill it for some time, according to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[559,3,2211,74],"class_list":["post-740101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-gaming","tag-news","tag-playstation","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}