PlayStation 5 owners warned of common mistake that can destroy your games

Sony’s latest console, the PlayStation 5, is almost four years old now, but owners are only recently realising that a certain thing (that most of us definitely always do) can lead to damaging your expensive machine.

As one Reddit user asked in a thread on the PlayStation subreddit, “Is it ok to leave a game disc in the PS5 even when you're not playing the game?”

This is actually a pretty common question, as a quick Google search will show that hundreds of posts about the exact same topic have cropped up over the years.

The comments in the thread warned against the practice, with one person stating, “I used to leave discs in my (PS4) all the time, one day my disc drive broke, likely because it was spinning and scanning the disc every time I took it out of rest mode.”

Astro Bot launches on PS5 next month.

Another user in a different thread a few years back shared a similar sentiment, noting that, “As for me, I left the disc inside and after a power outage, my PS5 couldn't read any discs anymore. Everything else works perfectly tho.”

So, is this actually true or is it just some old wives tale?

Potentially, it’s the latter, as no such thing is stated anywhere in the official PlayStation 5 Safety Guide.

Said user guide is also really, really specific about a lot of things too, such as making sure not to leave your discs stacked in a certain way in case it could potentially “warp” them.

It seems that users might just be confusing this with other issues, like for instance if you move your console while a disc is in the tray - something that has been known to damage both the discs and the console.

Also, personally, I left a copy of Dragon Ball FighterZ in my disc tray for like a solid sixth months and my PS5 still works fine so… take all of this with a grain of salt.

(Please don’t judge me for that last example.)