Of course the discs cost next to nothing to
make but that’s not the point. If you think like that you are completely misunderstanding the entertainment industry and their cost structure.
Actually making the game (not the disc but what’s on the disc) is extremely expensive and the production costs of AAA games are actually exploding. Think of all the more or less non-automateable manual work that is involved in creating believable virtual worlds. Think of all the textures that have to be painted, things that have to be animated, lines of dialog that have to be written and voice-acted. Much of this is hard, manual work. There is no way to make it better except by paying more people more money to do it.
The second thing that costs a lot is marketing, i.e. making sure that everyone and their grandparents actually know about the game and want to buy it, mostly because making AAA games is so expensive already, so it better be successful.
It’s perfectly reasonable to be worried about the new consoles and the future of (AAA) games. Even last generation expensive games like the Tomb Raider reboot sold tons of copies but were nevertheless barely satisfactory in their financial performance. Think about what kind of challenge it must be to make a game for a console fewer people have and that also needs much better assets (i.e. is more expensive) because what’s the justification for making a next-gen game otherwise?
The next few years will be extremely interesting for video games. I’m very much looking forward to see how that shakes out (though I wouldn’t necessarily want to work on AAA games). Will there only be few, safe and expensive mammoths like GTAV? Or safe and boring yearly updates to games like Call of Duty? Some of this is already happening. Just look at the bankruptcy of THQ. And on the other end of the spectrum there are tons of indie games popping up (which purposefully limit their scope – mostly by not creating photo-realistic virtual worlds – to get by with much less money).
This is a terribly exciting time for video games and I wouldn’t be surprised if this industry looks completely different in ten years (the supposed life-span of these new consoles – maybe the last consoles?).
All of this is not to say that Sony doesn’t take a hit on the console but plans to make money some other way, that is probably very true. But it doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that making a plastic disc costs a few cents.