Companies are abandoning discs because factories no longer produce drives – they are only needed for consoles

Physical game releases usually get mourned as a casualty of laziness, Sony, and digital sales – buyers got lazy, greedy Japanese companies want every penny they can squeeze out, and boxes vanished from shelves on their own. The reality turns out to be far more mundane and far harsher – even if everyone suddenly wanted discs again, there would soon be nowhere to physically put them.

Jez Corden of Windows Central reported this, citing his own sources within Xbox hardware.

According to him, the debate over the future of physical media has long since shifted away from the discs themselves and onto the drives that read them:

it's less about the discs and more about the disc drives themselves; the entire supply chain for the components required to make optical disc drives is collapsing

The logic here is purely economic. Factories and assembly lines that used to produce optical disc drives are pivoting toward more lucrative and scalable industries, including camera lens manufacturing.

Demand for disc drives today rests almost entirely on two consoles, Xbox Series X and PS5, while laptops, standalone Blu-ray players, and other devices have already moved away from the tech.

Plenty of indirect evidence backs this up without needing anonymous sources. Sony announced back in 2024 that it would stop producing recordable Blu-ray media, and Funai, one of the largest DVD and Blu-ray player manufacturers in the world, exited the market after going bankrupt.

The PS5 Slim got a removable disc drive as an optional accessory, while Nintendo has sidestepped the whole problem since Switch and Switch 2 run on cartridges rather than optical media. Tellingly, the Japanese market clings hardest to physical media, where boxed sales still outpace those in Europe and North America.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, asked about physical media, said she understands players love physical media but declined to comment on plans for the next generation. Skipping a direct "yes, there will be a drive" speaks louder than any technical report could.

There's also a more uncomfortable point worth raising: modern games still get installed onto the SSD in full regardless, and the disc has long since turned into an expensive offline installer with a license key attached.