With Sony confirming it will stop manufacturing physical game discs for new PlayStation titles from January 2028, there’s been a surge of renewed public interest in how those discs were being made in the first place. Game File’s Stephen Totilo went looking for answers — and what he found was a process far more guarded and logistically complex than most players probably imagine. Nobody he spoke to was authorised to talk on the record. Both Sony and Microsoft declined to comment. And yet the picture that emerged is genuinely illuminating, especially at a moment when physical media is heading toward its console endgame.
Why Nobody Would Speak on the Record
The immediate curiosity from Totilo’s report isn’t the process itself — it’s the secrecy surrounding it. Game disc production has been running continuously for decades across millions of units per year, touching publishers, manufacturers, and retailers in dozens of countries. You’d reasonably expect it to be something of an open secret by now. It isn’t.
Every source Totilo spoke to — from people involved with large publishers to those at smaller studios — shared information about how the process works, but none of them were authorised to speak on the record. When Totilo compiled his findings and sent them to Sony for fact-checking, the company declined to weigh in. Microsoft similarly stayed silent. Neither platform holder would confirm or deny the specifics of what their own disc manufacturing and certification processes look like.
The secrecy is even more striking given that Sony announced last month that this entire ecosystem is being wound down. You might expect that a company shuttering its disc production would be more relaxed about letting people understand how it worked. Apparently not. PS5 console boxes have already started appearing at stores warning buyers that from January 2028, newly released games on all PlayStation will only be available in digital format — and yet the mechanics of the process being discontinued remain officially undisclosed.
The Full Disc Manufacturing Process — Step by Step
Despite the wall of silence from the platforms themselves, Totilo’s sources walked him through the complete journey from a finished game to a disc on a retail shelf. Here’s how it works:
Step 1 — Publisher Request and Contract Signing
The process begins when a publisher decides they want a physical disc version of their game. They approach Sony or Microsoft to initiate the process. Before anything else happens, the publisher signs a contract that assigns them full liability for the inventory — meaning if the discs don’t sell, the publisher takes the financial hit, not the platform holder. This is one of the structural reasons why smaller publishers have historically been more cautious about physical releases: the financial exposure is real and sits entirely on their side of the ledger.
Step 2 — Certification
Before a disc can be pressed, the game has to pass the platform holder’s certification process. Certification is the technical and content review that Sony or Microsoft runs on every game — ensuring it meets their technical standards, doesn’t crash in specific scenarios, complies with rating requirements, and functions as expected across hardware configurations. This process applies to digital releases as well, but for disc production, passing certification is a mandatory gate before manufacturing can begin. Any failed certification means delays before the disc order can proceed.
Step 3 — Art, Disc Size and Format Decisions
Once certification is cleared, the publisher picks the disc’s art — cover design, disc label art, and any accompanying materials in the physical packaging. They also determine the disc size, which matters because not all games fit on a single disc. Larger games may require multiple discs or a larger capacity format, both of which increase the per-unit manufacturing cost. Publishers also choose the regional packaging format at this stage, since physical releases often have region-specific differences in rating labels, language support, and packaging dimensions.
Step 4 — Manufacturing
This is where Sony and Microsoft diverge significantly — and where one of the report’s most interesting details sits. Sony manufactures its discs in-house in most regions, while Microsoft has to go through contractors who end up paying its competitor anyway. In other words, Microsoft’s Xbox game discs are pressed by Sony, or by facilities that Sony has a stake in — meaning Sony profits from physical Xbox game sales even as it winds down its own physical disc business. The irony is almost too on-the-nose.
Sony’s factory in Thalgau, Austria, which has been pressing discs, currently stamps out around 600,000 blank discs a day, roughly half of which go toward PlayStation games. By 2028, production there will drop to about a tenth of current levels as the facility is converted to produce optical microlenses instead. The scale of that operation — 600,000 discs per day — gives some sense of how significant the physical business still is in absolute terms, even as its percentage share of revenue has fallen to low single digits for most publishers.
Step 5 — Distribution and Retail
After pressing, discs go through standard distribution logistics — warehousing, shipping to regional distribution centres, and then out to individual retail locations. The publisher manages this supply chain and absorbs the costs. Unsold inventory sitting in warehouses is the publisher’s problem, not the platform holder’s, which is why the initial contract assigns that liability upfront.
The Cost Breakdown — Why Physical Has Such a Thin Margin
The most concrete financial data point in the report is that the base cost of manufacturing a game disc comes out to “around 15 percent of the manufacturer’s suggested retail price.” On a $70 game, that’s roughly $10.50 in disc manufacturing cost alone, before any of the distribution, retail, or licensing fees that further compress the margin on physical sales. For a $80 game like GTA 6, that would be approximately $12 per unit just for the disc production.
That cost increases if the game is larger or requires multiple discs. This is one of the structural reasons why so many modern releases ship with a small amount of data on disc and a mandatory large download on day one — including games that are sold in physical cases containing a download code rather than a complete disc. Fitting a modern AAA title completely onto a disc is increasingly expensive from a per-unit standpoint, and compressing or splitting the data adds logistical complexity. The download-heavy physical release is the industry’s awkward middle position between fully physical and fully digital economics.
For comparison, a digital sale has none of these per-unit costs. No disc pressing, no packaging, no physical logistics, no retail margin to share. The margin differential between digital and physical is significant enough that Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick noted during the company’s most recent earnings call that their business is already “well over 90% digital,” a figure that makes the economics of physical production increasingly hard to justify at the platform level — which is precisely why Sony made the decision it did.
The Bigger Picture — Why This Is Happening Now
Sony’s July 1, 2026 announcement that new PlayStation games will stop being manufactured on disc from January 2028 was framed by the company as following “a natural direction” as digital consumer preferences “significantly outpace physical discs.” Their own FY2025 results showed that digital downloads made up 85% of full-game software sales on PS4 and PS5. Industry analysts put the overall digital share even higher in some segments.
The PS5 console boxes now appearing in stores with physical media end-of-life warnings printed on them indicate that Sony had been planning this for quite some time, since the manufacturing process for those new boxes would have begun months earlier. This wasn’t a reactive decision — it was a planned transition that Sony has been building toward internally while publicly maintaining the physical business until a clear line in the sand could be drawn.
Microsoft’s position remains different for now. Microsoft hasn’t announced any plan to stop physical Xbox Series X production, and reports suggest that before the recent Xbox reset, the company had been planning to continue supporting discs into the next generation as a potential point of differentiation against an all-digital PlayStation ecosystem. Whether that holds as a long-term commitment or simply a timing difference from Sony’s approach remains to be seen.
What’s clear is that the physical game disc — a format that has been central to console gaming for over 30 years — is entering its final chapter, and the process behind making it turns out to be something neither the platforms that profit from it nor the people who work within it are particularly willing to discuss out loud. Whether that’s straightforward business confidentiality or something more deliberate is hard to say. Either way, it’s a strange epitaph for a format that has shipped hundreds of millions of units and sat at the centre of gaming culture for three decades.
For more on the industry’s digital pivot, check out our coverage of the Take-Two Q1 2027 earnings and Zelnick’s comments on GTA 6’s digital-first launch and why Devolver Digital is leaving the public markets after a 96% share price collapse.
