Sony’s decision to stop all production of discs from 2018 which could lead to the demise of the entire physical media in the near future, has got to be the biggest piece of news in the industry that would have far-reaching ramifications throughout the coming months and years, possibly shaping the entire industry in ways that most gamers wouldn’t prefer. But it seems Sony was well-aware of how divisive their decision would be for most players and how they would react, as the company had reportedly issued their “strictest” social media guidelines to prevent any and all staff from publicly commenting on the situation.
This is according to Former Santa Monica Studio employee and God of War Laufey writer Alanah Pearce, who has claimed in a new Youtube video that Sony imposed it’s most adamant set of restrictions on the Playstation staff, which indicates they had clearly anticipated the entire situation beforehand. This also makes a lot of sense cause industry-altering decisions like stopping production of discs, are always taken after lots of studies and estimations, both internally and relevant to the overall condition of the worldwide marketplace.
“Sony already knew everyone would be pissed off,” Pearce began. “They knew this. 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,” she explained. “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. But in this instance, it is apparently the strictest the employees I spoke to have sever 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.”
This is actually a demonstration of the internal workings of huge megacorporations that actually run like autonomous ‘kingdoms’ and holds all the rights to regulate behavior of their employees in more ways than one.
One of the problems of the complete loss of physical media is that it’ll give players far less control over their owned videogames and can essentially remove all sense of ownership and rights which in turn leaves all of that in the hands of the publishers. This also takes away all sense of freedom of playing that gamers have towards their owned copies which is damning in more ways than one, making the industry move one step closer to a centralized, authoritarian model where huge corporations have all the control while the players have almost none.
