Sony created the PS5 disc drive shortage. Now they need to solve it

The PS5 Pro announcement has caused quite a stir in the gaming community. On one hand, a mid-gen refresh introducing a more powerful console onto the market is nothing new as both Sony and Microsoft did it just one generation ago. The $700 price tag of the PS5 Pro is a difficult pill to swallow, but that didn’t stop pre-orders from instantly selling out and immediately being relisted on eBay for thousands of dollars. The same thing happened to the 30th anniversary edition of the console, a bundle that featured the color scheme of the original PlayStation and had an MSRP of $999.99.

Although a lot of buzz around the PS5 Pro focused on the performance upgrades, there’s a hidden cost that would-be owners might not be thinking of. The PS5 Pro has completely ditched a disc drive, so if you value a physical collection, you need to spend extra and pick up an external disc drive. The good news is Sony makes an official attachment that sells for $79.99. The bad news is people have snatched those up too only to sell them at inflated prices.

A quick glance on eBay shows these attachments going for close to $130 in some cases, a number much higher than the initial price tag. If somebody were to miss out on the retail price of both the Pro and disc drive, it would cost them thousands of dollars to play their PS5 discs on their new console. That’s a big issue, and it’s something Sony has to address.

Sony has to right the ship

Things are getting bleak.

By removing the disc drive on the PS5 Pro, Sony has made it so owners have to buy a separate disc drive if they haven’t gone all-digital with their collection. It’s not an exciting prospect considering it costs extra, but it’s a manageable problem if Sony keeps them stocked. However, with only a limited supply of these attachments being available at a time, it’s punishing for PS5 Pro owners who have just upgraded their console and gave Sony hundreds of dollars. At the time of this writing, they are completely sold out at retailers like Best Buy and Walmart.

There’s obviously no going back for Sony, so this attachment will be in high demand through the end of the generation, considering two of the three PS5 models being sold are only digital. There’s a similar issue going on with Xbox as the Series S is digital only and the upcoming Xbox Series X refresh in October also ditches the disc drive. It’s a worrying trend for anybody fighting for a world that still has physical media, but it appears to be the direction things are moving in.

In an interview with IGN, PlayStation Senior Principal Product Manager Toshi Aoki talked about the decision to remove the disc drive. He said not everybody uses discs, and if people need to grab the attachment, it’s available.

“For the disc drive, it is an option for players. Not all players have discs, even though most players may…but we have the option for being able to add that for those players. So I think it’s more of the balance of the value proposition that we’re giving.”

As a tradeoff, the PS5 Pro launches with a 2 TB SSD, an amount that’s about double the available storage space of the base PS5. With some games becoming so bloated, owners could only keep a handful of games installed on their console before having to delete one to make room for another. At the very least, it’s nice to see this increase in storage if Sony plans on losing the discs.

There might be no going back

It’s the end of an era

While things look rough in the short term, there’s no need to pay these bloated prices to get your hands on a PS5 Pro or the disc drive. There’s no way Sony won’t keep making these attachments, especially if the demand remains. The funny thing is the demand is always going to be there because of the very situation Sony created. I’m not ready to hop on the doom train and say physical media is dead, but it’s not looking great.

At this point, it’s difficult to envision the PS6 or the next-generation Xbox launching with a disc drive, so maybe these attachments are what the future holds. If it continues to be an $80 attachment on top of the initial console purchase, it’ll certainly drive a lot of people toward a digital library, which could very well be the goal of these companies. Xbox head Phil Spencer spoke in 2023 about the importance of digital games and admitted Microsoft losing the Xbox One generation led to a scenario where Xbox might never be able to catch up.

“I see a lot of pundits out there that want to go back to a time when we all had cartridges and discs, and every new generation was a clean slate, and you could switch the whole console share,”
he said
.

With people buying more and more into digital libraries, and with this generation putting a big focus on backward compatibility, it means the games you buy on your PS4 can be used seamlessly on your PS5. The same thing goes for Xbox owners. This encourages PlayStation owners to stick with PlayStation and Xbox with Xbox. The days of a fresh start, like Spencer was talking about, are gone. It seems like both companies are aware of that too, since both don’t seem to prioritize a disc drive on their consoles anymore.

It might get rough, but the end isn’t here just yet

I don’t think there’s going to be a world, at least any time soon, where physical media dies completely. There will always be a vocal group of people still fighting the good fight, but it’s going to become more niche and expensive. We’re already seeing a squeeze like this happen with movies. Boutique labels like Arrow are selling their new 4K movie releases for $50. It’s not cheap by any means, but that’s the price to pay for the direction things are moving.

There are still some key benefits to going physical over digital that can’t be counted out. A big one is games being delisted from digital stores and disappearing forever. A prominent example of this is Sony’s Concord, a game that was fully released before being taken off the market just two weeks later. A physical copy of that game quickly became a collector’s item as it became the only way to play it.

With this in mind, it seems likely that there will always be a place, however small, for physical games. Which is why Sony owes its longtime fans a solution to this disc drive problem. They created the problem with their under-manufacturing and artificial scarcity, and it will be up to them to create a solution that will engender trust with their fanbase, many of whom have been sticking with the company for their entire 30 year existence. I don’t know what the solution is, but Sony needs to figure it out and fast, before the damage is done forever.