On July 1, 2026, Sony published a piece of news on the PlayStation Blog that had been circulating around the industry for years, but that none of the major console manufacturers had yet dared to put on the calendar: starting in January 2028, it will stop producing physical discs for all new games released for its consoles.
The reaction was immediate, although it did not move in only one direction.
Among players, it went down badly. A petition to stop the measure went from thirty thousand signatures to more than two hundred and fifteen thousand in a matter of days. Some users announced they were canceling PlayStation Plus, others posted on Reddit that they were selling their consoles, and even a fairly concrete response emerged from the company itself: users who started canceling the service began receiving automatic discounts of 25%, 33% and even 50% to stay.
On Wall Street, exactly the opposite happened. Over the following days, Sony shares rose by around 7%. For the market, there was a fairly simple calculation behind the decision: manufacturing, transporting, storing and distributing discs costs money. A digital sale avoids much of that expense and leaves a higher margin.
The same announcement could be read as a loss by customers and as an improvement to the business by shareholders.
In the middle of it all is Hiroki Totoki.
He is 62 years old, has spent practically his entire professional life at Sony and is now the person who has to stand behind that decision.
Totoki joined the company in 1987, just after graduating from Waseda University’s School of Commerce. He never left. Almost four decades later, on April 1, 2025, he became president and CEO of the group. His predecessor, Kenichiro Yoshida, had proposed his name, and the board approved it unanimously.
The PlayStation decision also affects him directly: since June 2024, he has also served as chairman of Sony Interactive Entertainment.
His career helps explain fairly well how he got here. He participated in the creation of Sony Bank, worked in the group’s internet business and, between 2014 and 2018, ran Sony Mobile during one of its toughest periods. In April 2018, he became chief financial officer. Five years later, he added the presidency and chief operating officer role, while continuing to oversee the finances.
Before taking charge of one of the world’s largest entertainment companies, Totoki had spent years watching the numbers.
And that perspective still appears in almost every decision he makes.
The three sales
Two days after the disc announcement, on July 3, Totoki sold 225,000 Sony shares at $21.02 each. The transaction was worth around $4.73 million and represented 56.5% of the shares of that class he held. He was left with 173,250.
When the Form 4 filing appeared at the SEC on July 7, the gaming community did not take long to connect the two events.
Sony had just announced a highly unpopular decision, and its CEO had sold more than half of his shares.
The interpretation began circulating almost on its own: Totoki was abandoning ship before it sank. Some channels even presented it as a sign of the beginning of the end for Sony.
The problem was that the same records showed something considerably less cinematic.
Totoki was not the only executive who sold that day. Nor was he the one who sold the most.
On July 3, at exactly the same price of $21.02, Chief Strategy Officer Toshimoto Mitomo sold 25,000 shares. Kenichiro Yoshida, chairman of the board and Totoki’s predecessor as CEO, sold 400,000, almost twice as many, for around $9 million. Chief Digital Officer Tsuyoshi Kodera sold another 68,500 in two transactions.
Four executives selling on the same day at the same price looks considerably less like a stampede than a predetermined trading window, the period during which a company allows its executives to buy or sell shares.
Meanwhile, Sony was doing exactly the opposite with its own money. The board had launched an aggressive share buyback worth around 500 billion yen.
That does not prove that everything was a perfect coincidence either. The sales were not publicly identified as part of one of the plans some executives use to schedule trades far in advance. And they took place after the PlayStation news was already public.
But there is quite a distance between that and saying “the CEO fled.”
Sony, in fact, did not change course. At the end of July, during the earnings call, CFO Lin Tao confirmed that January 2028 remained the date.
The CFO who took charge
When Totoki explains how Sony changed, he usually starts far away from PlayStation.
He starts with the iPhone.
Apple introduced it in 2007, and Sony’s hardware business took a blow that required years to absorb. Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The company found itself trapped between low-growth businesses and profitability that was far too weak.
For Totoki, that was where the transformation really began.
Sony had to stop asking what products it could manufacture and start asking what businesses it wanted to own.
The result can be seen in the numbers today. The group’s three major entertainment businesses account for more than 67% of revenue.
For decades, Sony was associated above all with televisions, audio equipment, cameras and consoles.
Today, it is more accurate to think of it as an entertainment company that still makes devices.
Not the other way around.
How to make more money from a console that has already been sold
To understand why Sony wants to end physical discs, it helps to look at the PlayStation 5 as a whole rather than only at the format in which its games are sold.
There are around 93 million PS5 consoles in homes around the world, and the console is already entering the second half of its cycle.
Totoki does not seem particularly concerned with continuing to push unit sales at any cost. For him, at this stage, something else matters more.
Sony already has the consoles installed.
Now it needs the people who own them to keep spending.
PlayStation has more than 125 million monthly active users. The question Totoki puts on the table is how to generate more revenue from that base over the next few years.
For the company, physical discs create two problems.
The first is obvious: they have to be manufactured, printed, transported, stored and placed in a store.
The second is even more uncomfortable for Sony: after a game is sold, the player can resell it.
That second transaction does not leave a cent for PlayStation.
Digital distribution eliminates both problems at once.
For the player, naturally, the calculation is different.
A disc can be lent, sold, given away or stored for twenty years. As long as a console capable of reading it exists, it remains an object that belongs to the person who bought it.
A digital license works differently. What is purchased is the right to access the game as long as the store, the account and the servers required to verify it continue to exist.
That is why behind the discussion about format lies a much deeper one: who really owns a video game.
The issue gained even more weight because Sony included in the same package of announcements the gradual closure of the PlayStation Store for PS3 and PS Vita.
It is not simply nostalgia for boxes.
It is a discussion about preservation.
Sony has not yet provided a particularly developed public response on that point. What it has done is begin offering automatic discounts to some users when they try to cancel their subscriptions.
Oasis
When Totoki talks about Sony’s future, there is one subject that seems to excite him considerably more than the debate over discs.
Intellectual property.
His idea is that a franchise should no longer live within a single format.
Sony can have a strong brand in video games, turn it into a series or a movie, get that production in front of people who have never played the game and then bring part of that audience back into the video game.
The Last of Us is probably the clearest example.
The series brought the franchise to millions of people who had never touched the game. Some of that audience later returned to PlayStation.
Totoki sees the same potential between anime and video games. That is why he frequently mentions Crunchyroll. The audiences overlap, stories can move from one format to another and each business feeds the next.
He is considerably more cautious with artificial intelligence.
Sony already uses it for heavy and repetitive tasks. One example he often gives is hair animation, a job that can consume many hours.
But when it comes to content, he draws a line. He believes people still value knowing that behind a work there were people, an intention and a story.
The former CFO becomes clearly visible again when he talks about capital.
When explaining Sony’s partnership with Apollo around its music catalogs, Totoki does not begin by talking about songs or artists. He talks about risk.
Different kinds of capital, he says, seek different things. Some money is willing to assume a great deal of risk in exchange for high returns, while other capital prefers more stable investments over long periods. Music catalogs, in his analysis, carry relatively low risk and also relatively moderate returns. That makes them suitable for private credit and patient capital.
It is a fairly revealing explanation.
Totoki runs a company that sells video games, movies, music, anime and experiences. But he often still reasons like the man who spent years watching the numbers.
There is also a less corporate side.
His favorite band is Oasis.
When the group returned to Japan after twenty years and played two nights at the Tokyo Dome, Totoki went to both. He says he had a great time.
The contradiction is difficult to ignore.
The executive who has just put a date on the end of one of the most recognizable objects in video game history spent two nights in a stadium watching something he could not download, store or replay whenever he wanted.
He had waited twenty years for them to return.
