Sony and Microsoft may be forced to go all‑digital next‑gen as disc drive components disappear

As Sony and Microsoft prepare for next‑gen hardware, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that either company will be able to offer disc drives, even as optional add‑ons, regardless of whether they actually want to. It has come to light that the supply chain for disc drives themselves is going extinct. 

Earlier this year, Sony confirmed plans to go all‑digital for future PlayStation releases. As part of that transition, the factory responsible for manufacturing physical PS5 game discs began re‑tooling itself for an entirely different product line, backed by new investment from Sony.

Now, a new report from Windows Central indicates that the supply chain behind optical disc drives themselves is also collapsing. According their industry sources, the few remaining companies still producing the specialised components required for disc drives are pivoting to other markets. As these components become less common, the cost of manufacturing disc drives rises sharply. Digital Foundry later corroborated this in a recent podcast, explaining that the component shortage has reached a point where producing drives at scale is becoming increasingly impractical.

This creates a major problem for anyone hoping physical media will remain an option. Even if Sony or Microsoft wanted to offer disc drives for their next consoles, the cost of sourcing the necessary parts could push the price of a drive up by hundreds of dollars. At one point, disc drives were cheap, near‑commodity components for both PCs and consoles. Today, they are niche hardware with shrinking manufacturing support, making them far more expensive to produce.

Physical media has already been struggling on the software side. As we reported recently, a study from Does It Play found that only 66 percent of PS5 discs work fully offline, while just 50 percent of Xbox Series X/S discs function without mandatory downloads.

Between disc manufacturing winding down and disc drive components becoming prohibitively expensive, the future of physical media is being squeezed from both ends. Even if platform holders wanted to keep discs alive, the supply chain may simply make that impossible, and any attempt to preserve physical support would likely result in higher hardware prices for consumers.

KitGuru Says: Physical media has been under pressure for years, but the supply chain issues emerging now make the situation far more complicated. Even if Sony or Microsoft wanted to keep disc drives around, doing so may soon be too costly to justify. If the next-gen Xbox or PlayStation had a disc-drive edition, but it cost $200-$300 more, would consumers be willing to pay that extra cash? 

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