PlayStation has been in hot water over the past few days, and while it's not hot enough to make it reverse its decision on destroying the physical games market, it has been spicy enough to stop it from posting on social media. Every corner of the internet has been dunking on the company, all the way from physical retailers to the pizza chain Dominos.

It's not often an outcry is universally shared among gamers, but this controversy has managed it, and even high profile PlayStation figures like former Sony president Shawn Layden are coming out and saying they disagree with the changes.

Shawn Layden Is Also Against PlayStation's Shift Away From Physical

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"I had no idea it was going to happen," says Layden in an interview with Eurogamer. "I don't necessarily agree with it but I don't work in the business any more. Maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive to stamp out discs."

"If you look at any decision to discontinue a product or a feature or model or what have you, largely it's a straight spreadsheet [decision]. What are disc 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 market! And that number just grew over time."

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Of course, Layden is coming at the problem with a more reasonable approach, given his ties to PlayStation and how little of a stake he has in the fight at all, but it's nice to know that even high-profile former execs aren't completely on board with what PlayStation is doing.

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That probably means that not everyone currently at PlayStation is on board either, and while it sounds unlikely that the company is going to reverse its decision, since 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 going sideways. If there's one thing that is true, complaining online usually works.

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PlayStation 5

Brand Sony Original Release Date November 12, 2020 Original MSRP (USD) $499, €499, £449, ¥49,980 (Base) // $399, €399, £359, ¥39,980 (Digital), Operating System Orbis OS Processor Custom 8-core AMD Zen 2 Resolution 720p - 8K Expand Collapse