Sony sells turntables as PlayStation kills physical discs, fans notice
Sony Electronics promotes physical media while Playstation is taking it away. PS fans are not happy.
Sony Electronics posted an ad for a turntable on July 25 promoting the “ritual of vinyl,” just three weeks after PlayStation announced the end of physical game discs. Same parent company, giving two different messages.
On July 25, Sony Electronics posted an ad for its LX3BT turntable. The pitch: “Rediscover the warmth, detail, and ritual of vinyl.” Drop the needle, press play, hear music the way it was meant to be heard, implying physical records offered the best listening experience.
Twenty-four days earlier, on July 1, PlayStation announced it was ending physical game discs, ending decades of tangible copies.
Both accounts belong to Sony.
Why people are angry at Sony over physical media
The short version: one arm of Sony is telling you physical media is a warm, tactile ritual worth owning, while another arm is telling you it’s obsolete.
PlayStation said on July 1 that new games will stop shipping on discs starting in 2028. Everything goes digital. The reaction was immediate and it hasn’t cooled off.
Players point out the obvious things you lose. You can’t resell a digital game. You can’t lend it, trade it, or leave it to anyone. You don’t really own it — you own a license Sony can revoke, and the game vanishes if the storefront ever goes dark.
Then Sony Electronics shows up selling the exact thing gamers just got told they can’t have. A physical format. Something you hold, keep, and actually own. All while claiming that is the superior way to experience music.
The backlash has been swarming Sony’s other accounts for weeks
The vinyl ad didn’t land in a vacuum. Sony-branded accounts have been under siege since the disc news broke, and not just the PlayStation ones.
Techdirt reported that when the main Sony account tweeted a single spider emoji to tease the next Spider-Man movie, a post that normally draws a few hundred replies pulled in over 3,000 — most of them people yelling about the discs.
PlayStation itself went quiet for nearly a week after the announcement, then came back on July 7 to promote a wireless flight stick. That video reportedly took 12,000 angry comments in under an hour.
So a turntable ad from another Sony division, three weeks into all that, was never going to be read as a coincidence. It read as the punchline.
Sony literally manufactures the physical media it says is dead
Here’s the part that makes the whole thing worse.
Sony Music presses its own vinyl. It reopened an in-house record plant in Shizuoka, Japan in 2018, its first vinyl production in nearly thirty years, specifically to cash in on the vinyl boom.
That boom is real. Vinyl outsold CDs in the US in 2025 for the fourth year running.
So inside the same company: the music division builds a factory to make more physical media, the electronics division sells you the machine to play it, and the games division decides physical media is a relic and phases it out.
Physical is a premium ritual when Sony sells the record. Physical is obsolete when Sony sells the game. The difference isn’t the format. It’s which quarter’s revenue it lands in.
Sony’s different divisions, one very mixed message
To be fair to the org chart, these are genuinely separate businesses. Sony Interactive Entertainment runs PlayStation. Sony Electronics sells the turntables. Sony Music presses the records. They have different bosses and different bottom lines, and no single executive necessarily signed off on both messages.
That’s the actual explanation. It’s also not much of a defense.
A customer doesn’t see three divisions. They see one logo telling them vinyl is worth savoring and discs are worth scrapping, in the same month, on the same platform. The corporate structure explains how it happened. It doesn’t make it read any less ridiculous.
Consumer backlash
Sony Entertainment’s post has received a lot of backlash.
“Somebody tell the guys at PlayStation. Apparently, physical media is worth supporting even if it is a small niche. PS games are much bigger than vinyl. Yet for some reason, they feel the need to kill gaming culture for profit. Shame!” - Does It Play?
“You see how vinyl has made a comeback and is selling like hotcakes, and you go and wipe out the physical format of video games. ¡Hypocrites!”- MiX Mistery
“I thought physical media was obsolete so why promote it? This is proof that Sony is throwing players under the bus for the sake of shareholders.” - Eybo
“The complete lack of co-ordination at Sony is breathtaking”- Jamie ZX
“wow a physical turntable how amazing. This just got me to follow every branch of Sony social media to let my feelings known across EVERY division” -AjH
“Wow physical media??????? So music is fine but a game isn’t???? Cool” - Jake Ryan
“oh so NOW you care about physical media”- star wyse
“Oh, so y’all do understand the importance of physical so media and the way things are “meant to be” used. Records are way older than video games, but for some reason you want to kill them anyway. Absurd.” - The Danliest
The needle drops. The disc gets deleted. Same company, same week, and only one of those is a “ritual.”
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Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
Hat Tips:
Sony Electronics via @SonyElectronics on X (July 25, 2026), verified for the LX3BT turntable ad and its “warmth, detail, and ritual of vinyl” copy
PlayStation Blog (July 1, 2026), verified for the announcement ending physical game disc production for new releases starting in 2028
Techdirt (July 8, 2026), verified for the backlash swarming unrelated Sony accounts, the Spider-Man spider-emoji tweet drawing over 3,000 replies, PlayStation’s week of silence, and the flight-stick video drawing roughly 12,000 angry comments in under an hour
The Vinyl Factory and Official Charts (2017), verified for Sony Music reopening in-house vinyl pressing in Shizuoka, Japan in 2018 after nearly thirty years
Record Store Directory (June 2026), verified for vinyl outselling CDs in the US in 2025 for the fourth consecutive year