Image credit: Eurogamer

Sony just announced its shocking decision to end the manufacturing of discs for all PlayStation games beginning January 2028. Although the company's announcement does not touch on its next-generation console, the announcement tells us a lot about the PlayStation 6.

Sony has not officially announced a PlayStation 6, but it has previously discussed the next generation of its hardware in a few ways. Sony's official stance is that it has not decided on a price or release date for the PS6 yet, but today's news offers the strongest hint yet about its release target: setting January 2028 as the last time PlayStation physical discs will be made is a strong indication that the PS6 will not launch until 2028. This is a belief shared by Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls.

"This pretty much guarantees that PS6 won’t arrive until 2028 at the earliest," Piers Harding-Rolls said on X.

We don't even know what the PS6 will look like, yet. | Image credit: Eurogamer / Sony

The initial estimates for when the next generation of consoles would begin put it somewhere at the end of 2027, but that was before AI datacentres gobbled up all the RAM and SSDs and their prices shot up considerably. This means the PS6 has likely been delayed internally, but we now have some indication of the new timeline.

Given today's news, it doesn't make any sense for Sony to release the PS6 in the usual November window in 2027, just a couple of months before eliminating discs for the platform altogether. A more likely estimate is late 2028, which is already a window that some have set as the next potential target, even before today's bombshell.

The belief is that the decision to "delay" the launch of the PS6 has all to do with the AI-driven, skyrocketing costs and shortages of RAM and fast storage. Late 2028 also happens to line up with estimates from analytics firm Ampere, which likewise currently expects the PS6 to arrive at the end of 2028, per Piers Harding-Rolls.

Image credit: Eurogamer

The other thing Sony inadvertently revealed about the PS6 with today's announcement is that the console is not going to have a disc drive. Even if we assume it's launching in late 2027, a few short months before Sony stops making discs for PlayStation games, why would the company ship any PS6 with a disc drive when it's going to be almost entirely useless shortly after launch?

This lends further credence to 2028 as the new target, and looking at when consoles have launched historically, the smart money is on autumn of 2028. While there is an argument to be made that some percentage of console owners use the disc drive as a blu-ray player for film and TV discs, I doubt that cohort is large enough to warrant the added cost. That's another thing worth keeping in mind: a console without a disc drive will be cheaper to manufacture than one with.

We know that the PlayStation 6 is going to be very expensive to make. Some estimate the cost to be around $960 for its components alone, which is a significant jump over estimates from just three months prior. If Sony is no longer interested in selling hardware at a loss, it makes a lot of sense to try and save money where you can, even if that means dropping the (relatively cheap) disc drive.

It's hard to imagine anyone will be broken up about the realisation that the PS6 won't be released for another two years. The real relevation is that the next generation of consoles looks incredibly likely to be the first to ditch physical media entirely.

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