PlayStation has been in hot water for the past few days, and while it's not hot enough to make it change its decision to destroy the physical gaming market, it's been spicy enough to stop it from posting on social media. Every corner of the internet has pounded on the company, all the way from brick-and-mortar retailers to pizza chain Domino's.
It's not often that an outcry is shared worldwide among gamers, but this controversy has done so, with even high-profile PlayStation figures like former Sony president Shawn Layden coming out to say they disagree with the changes.
Shawn Layden is also against PlayStation's Shift Away From Physical
“I had no idea that was going to happen,” Layden said in an interview with Eurogamer. “I don't necessarily agree with that but I'm not in the business anymore. Maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive to stamp records.”
“If you look at any decision to phase out a product or a feature or model or what have you, it's pretty much a straight spreadsheet [decision]. What are record sales compared to digital sales? And I'm old enough to remember when digital sales were like 10 percent — I'm old enough to remember when digital sales were zero percent because we didn't have a digital marketplace! And that number only grew over time.”
Of course, Layden comes at the problem with a more reasonable approach, given his ties to PlayStation and how little he has in the fight at all, but it's nice to know that even high-profile former executives aren't entirely on board with what PlayStation is doing.
That probably means not everyone currently on PlayStation is on board either, and while it sounds unlikely the company will change its mind, as it's been itching to abandon physical releases for a while at this point, the pressure could eventually get to the company if things start to go sideways. If it's one thing that's true, complaining online usually works.
- Stamp
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Sony
- Original release date
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November 12, 2020
- Original MSRP (USD)
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$499, €499, £449, £49,980 (Base) // $399, €399, £359, £39,980 (Digital),
- Operating system
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Orbis Olympics
- Processor
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Custom 8-core AMD Zen 2
- Resolution
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720p – 8K
