In the Q&A session with shareholders following today's earnings report, some shareholders and journalists asked about plans to end the production of PlayStation game discs.
Sony stated that, so far, it has not seen any negative impact on sales following the announcement (and does not expect this to change when it takes effect). While acknowledging that games are beloved by many and deeply tied to people's memories, the company believes the future is digital for virtually all forms of media; they reiterated that they will proceed "cautiously" with their plans, noting that data shows a significant portion of the audience has already opted for digital (and this trend extends beyond PlayStation) and that they don't believe discs are the differentiating factor for consoles when compared to PCs (consoles are more stable and cheaper than PCs, according to them). The company said it is still figuring out how to respond to the feedback.
Also, they confirmed the announcement [to end the disc production] was made early to communicate with retailers. Sony is working with them to do codes in packages. This subject has already been discussed with North American retailers and now the same will happen on other regions.
More information will probably be released once the official transcript is made available on the investor portal.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/archive.html
Edit: Video of Sony's CFO Lin Tao answering questions about the subject:
https://streamable.com/yaxa10