For those who don’t know, there has been somewhat of an uproar due to Playstation’s announcement about stopping making disks.
For those who don’t know, there has been somewhat of an uproar due to Playstation’s announcement about stopping making disks.
Plus like I pointed out, even if PS and their home electronics division died, Sony themselves will still live on because they have their hands in basically everything. They have a pro audio and video division, including ENG. They’re in the still cam business and make image sensors for pretty much everyone else too, and unless that changed, they also have an industrial imaging division as well.
Also, Sony barely makes dedicated disc players anymore, only having one model each of 1080p and 4K BD players in production, and I feel like those won’t be much longer for the world either.
Sony’s future dedicated media player is probably gonna be a glorified Roku-type streaming box; effectively a thin client to stream rented media to.
I’m surprised they even still make traditional AVRs and speakers and didn’t switch exclusively to soundbars or drop out of that market entirely yet, even.
The future for physical media is gonna be grim as even though you can still buy BDs/DVDs and CDs and vinyl second-hand, there might not be any new players for those formats being made in the foreseeable future anymore apart from videophile/audiophile stuff. Although in an odd twist of fate, and potentially a repeat of a trend from the early '80s when the audio CD first launched, CDs are outselling vinyl again.
That too, even if through some way gaming market crashes completely. There are multiple other branches that will keep Sony afloat.
As for second-hand physical games, from PS4 onward, there’s the chance that a lot of your discs might not work once support is dropped for those consoles as most of them are glorified license keys.
Nintendo made that concept literal with the Game-Key Cards and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch 3 if one actually happens, dropped carts altogether, and the Switch 3 effectively become a glorified tablet that you lost access to your games on after support is discontinued because it’s digital-only.
Even MS is playing with moving PCs to the cloud, and if Win365 takes off enough to get a consumer tier, it’s game over for PC ownership.
The only thing that’ll kill Sony as a company is if they have a CED-level screw-up as the CED was such a massive screw-up that it killed RCA as a company, and Sony has yet to screw up that badly. I make the RCA comparison because RCA in their prime, before their stupidity got the best of them, was basically in the position Sony is currently in with having their hands in basically everything. I really feel like Sony and other big companies for that matter, should treat RCA’s demise and the CED debacle that caused it as a cautionary tale, but that’s just my opinion.