Welcome to the first in what will be a series, hopefully, where we look at how consultants from places like McKinsey, Bain, BCG, holders of MBAs, and hiring practices based on superficial accomplishments have ruined and killed the industries, brands, companies and things we love.

We lovingly and appropriately are calling this series "Consultants are Serial Killers" because they are the Buffalo Bill of the business world and yet companies still clamor to hire them, job descriptions still say "MBA preferred," and they still hold some of the highest (if not the highest) positions at companies we all love.

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During the First Console Wars in the year of our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety-Four (1994), I solemnly pledged my life to house Sony and their PlayStation. This was during a time when the console wars actually felt like wars and not just "which subscription service do I regret less and will have less frequent price hikes." During this time, and until recently, I defended the honor of Sony through some rough patches. I fought bravely when KillZone came out on PS2 as the "Halo killer" (it was not). I stuck around after the PS3 launched at $600 ($1000+ in today's prices). I kept it cool with the multiple PSN outages. I have bought the "just trust us" energy on more than one occasion.

I can't keep doing that anymore, and it's not because of one bad decision. It's because somewhere along the way, actual gaming executives who understood the room got replaced by or started trusting the advice of a rotating cast of MBAs and consultants whose entire vocabulary is "digitalization of content" and "we're going to cautiously move this forward," and at some point that stops being a rough patch and starts being a personality.

Chapter 1: They're killing physical discs

In July, Sony announced it is ending physical disc production for PS5 (and presumably PS6) games starting January 2028. Just... done. No more walking into a store, no more trading games with your friends, no more getting a $1 for your old PS game and buying a used one for $40 at GameStop. All gone, so a spreadsheet could go up and to the right for a few quarters (ooohhhh ahhhhh).

Look, I get it, digital is where the margin is and if you charge the same price as physical (totes MBA move - charge full price for a product you no longer have to manufacture, ship, or let anyone resell), that chart goes even further up and to the right. But the backlash to this wasn't a "well, some people are annoyed" reaction. The announcement tweet reportedly pulled in something like 57,000 replies and 55,000 retweets, 99% furious, and anyone who tried to defend it got absolutely dragged in the replies. One writer flat out called it PlayStation's biggest scandal in 20 years. I agree and that's coming from someone who lived through everything I said in the first paragraph.

And it hasn't cooled off since. A petition against the decision has crept toward 200,000 signatures, a chunk of the fanbase organized a week-long PlayStation blackout urging players to log off and stop spending entirely, and multiple lawsuits are now working through the courts over the digital ownership and licensing mess this exposed, including one where Sony's own lawyers argued in a filing that it's "not plausible" for a reasonable consumer to believe they ever owned a digital game they clicked "Buy Now" on. Read that again. The company is in federal court arguing that the word "buy" doesn't mean what you think it means, while simultaneously killing the one format that actually did convey something close to ownership. That's a consultant saying something ridiculous in a strategy session, a legal partner nodding yes furiously, and a finance department getting so hot and bothered that the chart will even go HIGHER up and to the right. All the while the actual customers watch their libraries turn into rented storage space.

Sony's response to all the outrage? The CFO, Lin Tao, at a shareholder Q&A, basically shrugged and explained the decision was about "the digitalization of content overall" progressing, that's the kind of sentence that sounds like it was generated by a consultant who has never once played a video game but has absolutely built a slide titled "Digital-First Transformation Roadmap." Cool. Cool cool cool. Great use of a Q&A session.

And can you guess Ms. Lin's education background? MBA. Joined Sony and led Sony Mobile for a period of time to then be transferred to Sony Interactive (Totally unrelated, how's Sony's mobile business?). I really want to know something about Ms. Lin, prior to joining and since joining Sony Interactive how many hours has she logged on her PlayStation(s)? And what her unfiltered thoughts are of adults (married/unmarried) that still play video games?