Sony is stopping disc production for PlayStation games, so only factory that makes CDs for it will now retrain 300 employees to manufacture…

Sony's last remaining PlayStation disc factory is already moving on to something else. The Thalgau plant in Austria makes 600,000 discs a day, half of them for PlayStation, and it's now being converted to produce optical microlenses instead.

All 300 employees at the site are set to be retrained for the new work, according to a report from The Verge.January 2028 is when Sony stops producing discs for new PlayStation games, the company confirmed this week. Games out before then keep their disc editions; after it, digital is the only option. The blog post gave a date, but not a timeline—Sony had clearly been moving on this well before it said so.

Sony's last disc plant is switching production lines

Thalgau is the headquarters of Sony's disc-making division and its only remaining wholly owned disc manufacturing site.

Sony DADC president Dietmar Tanzer told Austrian broadcaster ORF Salzburg that the plant will be making only around 10 percent of its current disc volume by 2028, matching the PlayStation cutoff date.Sony used to make discs in the US as well. It ran a plant in Terre Haute, Indiana for decades and another in New Jersey until that one closed in 2011. Production was consolidated in Thalgau by 2022, and the Indiana site now packages headlight components for automakers instead.

300 disc workers are shifting to lens manufacturing

The Verge cites a behind-the-scenes video from December 2024 that shows Thalgau staff already testing microlens production, with up to 60 micro-optics fitting on a single disc. Sony has put €30 million into the new line, and ORF Salzburg reports mass production could start as early as next year.Microlenses are used in headsets and other devices that need precise light control. But the example given by the head of Sony's micro optics division, in comments to ORF Salzburg, was simpler: car turn signals that project their pattern onto the road, an idea automakers have already been testing.

What happens to the rest of the disc business

The numbers give some sense of scale. Sony's disc division has made more than 26.4 billion discs total, and 23 billion of those came from the Indiana plant between 1983 and 2022, according to the company's own figures. Thalgau, by comparison, is a much smaller operation, but it's the one Sony chose to keep running the longest.That raises a question the PlayStation announcement didn't answer: whether disc drives disappear from consoles entirely once the format winds down, or whether Sony keeps a smaller, optional option around the way it did with the PS5's disc and digital editions. Nothing from Thalgau confirms either direction. What it does confirm is that Sony isn't treating this as a temporary cutback—the factory's own equipment is being repurposed for a different industry altogether, which is a harder thing to reverse than a policy on a blog post.