Sony avvecklar sin sista 4K UHD Blu-ray-spelare och lämnar PS5 i behåll

Sony Japan ended sales of the UBP-X700/K on 22 October, its last standalone 4K UHD Blu-ray player, which leaves the PlayStation 5 as the only UHD Blu-ray player Sony still sells in that market. The X700/K only arrived in May 2025, and it became the last one standing after the UBP-X800M2 was dropped more than a year ago.

The report came from Kunkoku (via FlatPanelsHD), a Japanese blog that also sells Sony hardware, and Sony Japan’s own store now lists the player as out of stock with a line saying it will not be restocked. There is no press release and no global confirmation, so the X700/K is still listed in the US and Europe for now. No successor has been announced, and Panasonic is the only major electronics brand left making these players at all.

“Sony ends shipments of Ultra HD Blu-ray player UBP-X700/K. Following the end of Blu-ray recorder sales and the announcement that PlayStation game disc production will cease, the PS5 will be Sony’s only UHD Blu-ray player in Japan.”

— Kunkoku

A console is a workable substitute on paper. Physical media guides have recommended a PS5 or an Xbox Series X with a drive as a perfectly good UHD player for years, and the HDMI cable in the box does the job. What neither console does is Dolby Vision from a disc, which dedicated players handle, so the replacement is a downgrade for anyone who bought into the format properly.

It also runs into Sony’s other decision. The company said in July that it would go digital only for all new PlayStation games from January 2028, with anything released before that date keeping its disc version, and it pointed at downloads making up around 78 percent of game sales in 2025. So the machine inheriting Sony’s UHD business is the same machine Sony is removing the reason to own.

My read on the game side has not changed since July. That looks like floppy discs going quiet rather than a format being taken away, and it comes with the upside that discs slowly turn into collectible objects. Movies are a different case, because a 4K disc is often the only version of a film you can own outright rather than rent from whichever service currently holds it.

Sony braced for the reaction before it came. God of War Laufey writer Alanah Pearce said colleagues across PlayStation’s first-party studios described the communication rules around the disc announcement as the strictest they had worked under, which she took as evidence that Sony knew it would land badly.

“They would only have done this if they knew it was going to be an enormous PR issue. This is no surprise to them.”

— Alanah Pearce

The pushback since has been loud and ineffective. A petition against the disc decision passed 335,000 signatures, boycott campaigns circulated for weeks, and Kantan Games analyst Serkan Toto put it plainly: Sony has over 120 million active users and will wait the storm out, because even half a million cancellations would come to roughly one percent of the business.

Hardware has been going the other way on price. Sony has raised prices worldwide on 2 April, by $100 to $150 depending on the model, putting the PS5 at $649.99, the Digital Edition at $599.99 and the Pro at $899.99 in the US, and pushing the PlayStation Portal to $249.99 three years after launch.

“After careful evaluation, we found this was a necessary step”

— Isabelle Tomatis, Sony Interactive Entertainment

Then there is the console Sony priced the other way. The Midnight Black $350 PS5 Digital Edition opened for pre-order on 20 October at 55,000 yen and ships in Japan on 19 November, locked to Japanese accounts and the Japanese store. It has no drive. A matching Midnight Black disc drive sells separately for about $75, which is now how you buy the component that used to come attached to the thing.

I own a PS5, and the drive in it has quietly become the whole of Sony’s UHD player lineup in one country. That is a strange place for a games console to end up, and it is not a position Sony seems interested in defending.

The direction of travel shows up in the patent filings too. Sony has filed a system to pay through the controller, published on 17 September, in which a phone passes payment credentials to the pad, which repackages them and hands them to the console when a purchase prompt appears. The stated goal is removing friction at checkout, which also means keeping the entire transaction inside Sony’s own store.

Nothing about this year has been additive. Sony sold much of its TV and hardware manufacturing to TCL, which took a controlling stake in the Bravia business, exited the Blu-ray recorder market in February, and had already left standalone CD and SACD players behind. On the games side, it announced layoffs at Bungie in June, after Destiny 2’s final update, with most of the Destiny team and part of the Marathon team cut. The UHD player is one line in a long year of subtraction.

Demand for the console itself is not the problem. After Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look drew 31.1 million viewers on Netflix, NielsenIQ logged a sales jump of 33 percent for UK PS5 sales and 34 percent for Xbox Series in the following week, with Sony’s own store left holding a single PS5 Pro model. People will still queue for the box. They are being sold a box that does less each year.

The part worth arguing over is narrower than the format itself. Buying a game is turning into buying a licence to play one, and a movie library that lives on a service can be edited, replaced or removed without anyone asking. I want a side door left open, whether that is publishers pressing their own disc runs or a cartridge in place of a disc, though nothing about this year suggests Sony will build one.

Read also, Marvel’s Wolverine topped charts in the US in September on Circana’s full-game dollar sales, a month after its reception turned into an argument, and it is one of the last first-party PlayStation games that will ship with a disc in the box at all.