Sony’s PlayStation disc factory is already being repurposed

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

Thalgau isn’t just one of Sony’s disc plants. It’s where the disc-making division is headquartered, 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 and moved all manufacturing from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the Indiana facility markets itself to automakers who need help packaging and assembling headlights and the like instead.

This transition didn’t happen overnight. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlenses as of then:

Those lenses, too, are created using discs:

ORF Salzburg writes that Sony has now invested €30 million to manufacture these microlenses, and that mass production may begin “as early as next year.”

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’s micro optics division gave ORF Salzburg the example of “a car turn signal that is projected onto asphalt.”

All of this is to say: Sony didn’t make this decision in a hurry, and it isn’t likely to change its mind despite the predictable backlash. It’s been winding down disc manufacturing for decades, and it’s ripping off one last band-aid with PlayStation.

According to Sony DADC’s website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date — the vast majority, 23 billion of them, were made between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.