'Father of the PlayStation' Ken Kutaragi sides with Sony on the physical discs debate

The debate about Sony's plan to stop making physical PS5 discs has raged since this summer.

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Ken Kutaragi, the engineer who led Sony's development of the original PlayStation, PS2 and PS3, says he understands why players are angry about Sony ending disc production, but doesn't think keeping discs around is economically reasonable. 

Speaking to VGC at the Game Republic New Horizons conference in Middlesbrough, England, on October 15, the former Sony Computer Entertainment chairman and group CEO said physical discs had come to stand for owning a game, and that the resistance to a disc-free PlayStation might be "a mentality issue." Given that he left Sony in 2007 and now runs his own companies, this is very much his own view rather than the official position of Sony, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Kutaragi told VGC that the PS2 and PS3 had network features which weren't as widely used as they are in today's consoles. He compared consoles to smartphones, saying that now most people are online, nobody expects physical media because people trust that their content will stay with them. Meanwhile, Sony's official position appears to be at odds with that. Responding to a class action in a California federal court in August, the company said reasonable consumers know they don't own digital downloads, only a license to play them (which can be revoked.) 

Kutaragi also suggested that current PlayStation leadership sees the platform differently from the company he ran, commenting that Sony Interactive Entertainment has hired many people from Gaikai and other streaming businesses. "[They may see] PlayStation as not just a game console, but also a content terminal," he told the gaming outlet.  He predicted the move away from discs way back in 2006, telling GameSpot at the time that digital distribution of games would eventually render discs unnecessary. 

Sony announced back in July that it'd stop making disc-based PlayStation games starting in January 2028, citing players' growing preference for digital. Digital downloads made up 82 percent of PS4 and PS5 full-game sales in the April to June quarter, and physical software brought in ¥20.5 billion of the ¥526.6 billion Sony made from game software, less than four percent. During Sony's July 31 earnings call, CFO Lin Tao said the company would move forward with its plans cautiously despite the strong opinions from players. By then, an online petition asking Sony to keep physical games had passed 352,000 signatures. 

Kutaragi is the third former PlayStation exec to weigh in on the debate. Shuhei Yoshida, former president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, said in August that he's a fully digital player and doesn't see why losing discs is a big problem. Former Sony Worldwide Studios chairman Shawn Layden told Brian Crecente's Game newsletter that a disc-free PlayStation would be "depressing, but solvable," if Sony licensed its disc-pressing process to outside manufacturers, as Microsoft does for Xbox. Kutaragi sits squarely in the middle of those two positions, accepting Sony's logic while saying he understands that discs have "become a metaphor for 'owning' games."  

Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) took the ownership question to Congress on October 15, announcing the Power to the Players Act, which would direct the FTC to write rules treating purchased games as owned rather than licensed. If it passes, it'd also require online games to get an offline mode before their servers shut down, but the bill hasn't been formally introduced yet.