Sony’s PlayStation disc factory is being reorganized

The The video game album is deadand Sony is preparing kill it for a while, according to the Austrian report. The man who heads Sony’s broadcast operations, Sony DADC President Dietmar Tanzer, he said ORF Salzburg that the company’s Thalgau factory produces 600,000 discs every day, half of them for PlayStation – but since it will be producing 10 percent of this volume in 2028, it plans to retrain all 300 employees to work on optical microlens instead.

Thalgau is not fair one of Sony’s disc plants. It is where the disc manufacturing sector is headquarteredand it appears to be its only remaining facility that manufactures discs. Sony made discs in the United States for many years, first in Terre Haute, Indiana and later in New Jersey, but closed the last plant. in 2011 and moving all production from Indiana to Thalgau in 2022. Today, the location is Indiana they sell themselves to car manufacturers making a package and assembling the headlights etc. instead.

This change did not happen suddenly. A behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 shows that the Thalgau plant was already working on microlens since then:

These lenses, too, are made using discs:

ORF Salzburg they write that Sony has now invested 30 million euros to develop these microlenses, and that mass production should begin “next year.”

Microlenses are used professionally in all kinds of upcoming applications where you want to tilt, including headphones, but it looks like Sony may be helping automakers here as well. The head of Sony’s Micro Optics division offered ORF Salzburg an example of a “turn signal appearing on the tarmac.”

This means: Sony didn’t make a quick decision, and it won’t change its mind either self-evident babbling. It has been reducing disc production for years, and is removing the last support from the PlayStation.

According to the Sony DADC website, it has produced over 26.4 billion discs to date – many, many, 23 billion of themwas produced between 1983 and 2022 in Terre Haute, Indiana.