Former Santa Monica Studio employee Alanah Pearce says Sony has enforced its strictest social media rules after the controversial decision to stop producing physical game discs beginning in 2028.
News of Sony’s decision thrust the physical media debate back into the spotlight, and attention on the situation hasn’t waned since. Sony has continued to post on social media but hasn’t directly addressed the elephant in the room.
Now, Pearce, who also served as a writer on the upcoming God of War: Laufey title, is sharing what she’s heard about the social media guidelines Sony put forth in the wake of the announcement.
- More Physical Media News: PlayStation Confirms Support for Existing Physical Games Post 2028
Alanah Pearce Says Sony Tightened Social Media Rules
Alanah Pearce addressed the situation in a recent YouTube video, revealing that Sony was aware of how upset people would be by the news and that those within the company’s first-party development studios have shared that Sony put forth strict social media guidelines for this issue.
“People working at PlayStation first-party studios told me that Sony had the strictest social media guidelines for this particular thing that they’ve ever seen issued. Sony does somewhat regularly tell employees what they can or can’t say about certain things. I was under a lot of guidelines when I was working on God of War: Laufey. I still am, and they did send me guidelines regarding what I could say on the day that the game was announced,” she said. “In this instance, it is apparently the strictest the employees I spoke to have ever seen regarding public communications. They would only have done this if they knew it was going to be an enormous PR issue. This is no surprise to them.“
One of the major releases coming out this year that is also pushing towards the All Digital future is Grand Theft Auto 6. There are currently no plans to release that game physically. Learn more about that here.
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I don’t have any issues with this. People need to realize that the majority of people by digital and really don’t care about physical.
You can’t be okay with you and all other Playstation players having only revocable licenses to play games digitally. That’s the reality if Sony goes all digital, because by its own admission it does not support digital ownership of your games.
People only put up with it this long because they were (and in some cases still are) ignorant of the ownership issue or they understood that they still had a choice. Now that choice is being viscerally and forcefully taken away, so the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no way to put it back in.
The least damaging things Sony can do are reverse course and continue to make physical games, explicitly acknowledge digital ownership, or both. In the long run the market and/or governments will punish Sony for this: Playstation can’t be PC and console simultaneously and competitively: it will have to ditch the console to compete or reverse course and embrace it. Unlike PC, it’s not like you can buy and play Xbox or Nintendo (or GOG or whatever) games on your Playstation, and you don’t have the freedom to use different hardware you want to play Sony games, either. Sony’s trying to have its cake and eat it too, but is offering the worst of both worlds: digital licenses with neither a secondary market to keep prices down nor rival providers for the platform (like PC has) to compete with Sony and keep the console’s deals fair.
We’re not fighting to kill Sony: We’re trying to save it from the regulations and legal challenges and long-term decline that shall occur because Sony is ultimately biting off more than it can chew. Especially since it’s apparently planning to phase out all physical media like with Crunchyroll, and that’ll affect even more people. But it’s very hard to save either people or companies from their own mistakes.
Yes, you will be first in line to rent your PS6 along with your rented library of games.
I don’t pay for gaming liscenses. I don’t rent,I don’t pay for concepts or non tangible property that really belongs to someone else.Keep your property,I’ll find something real to spend my money on ,or do without.