Sony’s PS5 Slim Disc Drive Needs an Internet Connection to Install

The digital edition of Sony’s PlayStation 5 (PS5) Slim will let you add in a disc drive later, but there’s a catch. Both that model and the standard model need an internet connection before you can use the drive.

It’s not officially named the PlayStation 5 Slim, but this November is expected to see the release of a more compact PS5. And as was the case with the original, it’ll come in two models, one with a disc drive and one without. The difference is that this time around you can add a disc drive to the discless model. But, as spotted by Twitter user Thunderclart, you’ll need an internet connect to set it up. They’ve posted a scan, seemingly from a PS5 Slim console, that states as much.

“Internet connection required to pair Disc Drive..,” the small print explains. However, as becomes clear when you look at one of their other Tweets, this isn’t a scan of the discless digital version.

Instead, it appears that, thanks to the modular nature of the disc drive, even the regular PS5 Slim will require an internet connection to activate the disc drive. That’s absolutely not the case with the current fat models.

Once you’ve set it up, that should be all, but this move has proven a little contentious. “Goodbye, game preservation,” puts one Reddit user.

Is that fair comment? Sort of, because it does mean that, in the unlikely event that whatever online service Sony uses to activate these drives go down or is retired, the drives themselves could become useless.

It’s not been confirmed but it seems likely that a factory reset would require the owner of the console to re-pair the drive with the console. The PS3 has long since been retired but you can buy a PS3 second hand, grab a few discs and you’re good to go.

If, on the other hand, someone picks up a slim PS5, say, fifteen years from now, they could find themselves unable to use it for physical media, because they can no longer activate it.

Is this the end of the world? No, but it’s definitely a concern as far as game preservation goes. So why, then, would Sony do this? They’ve yet to issue any kind of statement to this effect but it’s almost certainly an anti-piracy measure.

One method of attack, when it comes to running homebrew games, and potentially, pirate games, is to fool the disc drive into thinking it’s running a legitimate disc when actually it’s a copy or even an image of a disc, sitting on a hard drive.

By making the PS5’s disc drive modular, they’ve added another in to the PlayStation, a method by which hackers could break the console’s protection. It makes sense they’d lock it down.

So while this seems like a user-unfriendly move, it makes sense from Sony’s side of things. As to whether the PS5’s disc drive stays locked down, we’ll just have to wait and see.