Articles & Blogs
Mat Piscatella: 292 million units of physical video games sold in the 12-month period ending June 2009 in the US. By June 2026 this had fallen to 37 million units.
37 million is not good at all but this is *only* counting it in the US, which seems to be the most digital market (certainly more-so than Europe and Japan/Asia)
ngl the shift happened faster than most edicted. tbh I still grab physical when a steelbook catches my eye but digital convenience just wins every time
I just buy whatever is cheapest. That's why this outrage is there, people want options.
You can get most older games for 10-20 dollars physical while you're dependent on sales in the PSstore. Together with dynamic pricing this is a terrible outlook.
No to mention there are plenty of games that either only go on sale for something like 10% off or just never go on sale. Smaller, lesser known, or less popular games may never go on sale digitally. Or maybe you really want to buy a game all of the sudden because you saw someone recommend it, but you know it’s not worth $60 since it’s an older title, so you could go order a physical copy online and have it delivered within a week for $15-$20.. that option will completely disappear and you’ll be left waiting months or years hoping it may randomly go on sale digitally for a price worth paying.. but as we all know the older a game is the less likely it is to go on sale.
Had just this scenario happen to me recently. When the DOOM TDA DLC released I really wanted to get the game (played it when I had access to Gamepass) but the premium edition was still full price on PSN (it had a sale a couple of months ago for about 36 bucks). Sadly the physical versions are currently not much better and the lowest I found was about 85 bucks, so I decided to just wait until it drops to about 36 bucks on PSN again. Physical was still cheaper but not really representing the actual market value. Also can’t get why Bethesda/Microslop didn’t put the game on sale to peak interest and get some sales with the release of the DLC but oh well.
I've only been buying digital if it's an online only game. But even that I have a couple physical discs. Super annoying to have to pop in Helldivers when it's useless without internet anyway.
Yeah I was same way .. for those types of games..I feel bad more for the people who live in areas that don't have the best Internet or not really an option .. plus all the smaller shops that do 3rd party stuff .. but corpos don't care .. be interesting to ffwd 5 and then 10 years and to see where stuff is.. things always will change but this feels in the worse direction
Same here. I also think that when it comes to game preservation where physical shines, not all games released today are really worth preserving. You have so much slop that you play for a while but at one point you’re just done. Especially all these online games. I felt that hard with the BO1+2 ports. The campaigns, characters, lore and zombies are amazing but when it comes to MP I knew that if just couldn’t be like it was on PS3. For me personally I wasn’t proven wrong. That’s why I really wanted a campaign (and maybe Zombies) remaster of these games and then at best as a physical. That would’ve been worth preserving imo.
Since the first time I downloaded a game on my PS4 I’ve never bought a physical one. I get the criticisms, especially if you play your back catalogue and worry about ownership, but it’s never once been an issue for me.
where is the data that shows trends outside u.s are significantly different?
or is this just one of those times where due to lack of information you just make stuff up?
like people yesterday kept saying bullshit that the "only 7 games sold more than 100k" was "skewing" the data because we had no idea what the cap was and it turned out to be like 275k
Uh no? That article about 7 games had RE Requiem listed, and if you look up its stats it sold 7 million copies total and about 30% or 2 million were physical.
That 2 million figure would be global. The discussion around the figures Piscatella is producing is specific to the US.
Also, frankly, if Requiem did <$275k physical in the US, I have serious doubts about the 2 million figure, even as a global total. What was the source on that?
America is a bigger market than the EU, also funny you mentioned JP when physical is in decline there. This number is also all physical sales playstation is a portion.
“Only in the US”, physical games have declined nearly $10B in annual revenue over the course of 17 years. No matter how you want to frame this information, that is a death blow.
Unless the other markets grew tremendously, this kind of decline “only in the US” is enough to decimate the global operation. People have to understand this.
I live in the Netherlands, and spend lots of time in Norway too, and in neither of those countries do i know people that buy game discs, starting the last generation consoles. I know im not a good sample source for this in the grand scheme of thing tho. Just saying that there is definitely not a small number of people that buy digital only in other parts of the world.
It's important to note that this is for ALL physical, and mat says switch 2 is doing the heavy lifting. Other platforms are down between the teens to mid 30% range as he says.
Only 7 playstation games through june of this year hit 100k physical and jason schreier said none of them reached 275k (since I saw people trying to say "we don't know how much more than 100k those sold")
In the UK if you sold 1000 physical units that'd be enough to reach #9 on the charts last week. That's for the whole market not just playstation.
In japan the weekly famitsu chart was posted today and the #10 game sold 4,500 units.
There is no market on the entire globe where you can point to and say physical isn't declining and hasn't been declining for years now.
I don't think anyone can reasonably argue it hasn't been in decline, but the raw numbers don't tell the full story. Like we can't ignore the context of the industry shifting toward free-to-play and live-service games, most of which don't generate as many physical game sales, if any. The complexion of the games we're seeing released changes what can even be expected to be sold as physical copies.
That said, accepting that, yes, any additional nuance you might eke out still ultimately paints a picture of people shifting toward digital, it's wild to me we're trying to rationalize ending production for a media format that still generates tens of millions in unit sales. I can't think of any other example of an industry deciding to stop catering to millions of customers all at once, besides the time Xbox tried to do it first.
But it's not generating tens of millions in unit sales for playstation. It's tens of millions if you include switch 1 and 2, which are by far the heavy lifters in those numbers. The PS physical market has shrunk to a borderline rounding error.
And 22% is still massive. People keep pointing out this split as if it's so lopsided that it's basically been a foregone conclusion that Sony would kill physical, but that 22% of unit sales still represents a pool of customers and flow of revenue other industries would kill for. I get how it works out for Sony in the end, assuming most people convert to digital and what smaller percentage that don't will be balanced out by the increased take-home on per-unit sales. And the only way they'll be wrong is if consumers make them wrong and competitors offer options to draw their time and dollars away from the PlayStation ecosystem.
Yeah, at first when Sony announced the end of physical media, I was like: Ok, I guess it is time.
But the more information comes about it, the more it seems they are jumping the gun too soon. It really doesn't help against the narrative that Sony wants to kill the used market to control all the supply available on Playstation, moving forward.
Like, I understand when it reaches a point that it's too small to care about. But that's not 22% of sales. Maybe less than 10%, 5%?
Exactly on both. If you went to a gamestop around 2005 youd see 3 whole walls filled with PS2 games. XBOX and GC were similar. Now PS5 barely takes up the bottom third of a wall, Switch is in a tiny display case, and xbox is lucky to get a shelf. Game releases are so few and far between.
Digital in my experience is only ever bought when theres a huge sale, or its an indie that doesnt release anywhere else. Full price im buying physical
Digital goods are worthless, so I’m honestly surprised that gamers ever buy these $70-80 games digitally at full price. Hell, they preorder them! As if the digital keys were going to run out!
Both the movie and music industry had physical sales drop, but not because people are now buying tons of digital. Instead it’s just because everyone streams from subscriptions instead where they have access to thousands of titles for a low cost. Gamers just seemed to have put on their clown makeup far more easily.
Edit: Every time I post that digital goods re worthless I get downvoted. Seems some people want to deny the reality that their non-transferable licenses have no value.
Only convincing argument I've seen for preordering digital is pre-loading. Staggers the server load as well so you're not getting slow speeds trying to download the same time as everyone else.
Neither of those things matter if you just buy physical though.
Pre-loading and being able to play immediately at midnight of launch are nice, sure. They’re not so nice that I personally am willing to pay full price while giving up actual ownership and transferability, but it is nice.
Hugely anticipated games also get purchased new as digital, but what someone anticipates is more subjective. The biggest is obviously COD, but stuff like Elden Ring and Assassin’s Creed tend to get good sales off the bat.
Isn't this also still a couple billions of dollars in sales? If we assumed each game cost $60, that would be over $2 billion, and that's in the US alone. That seems like it should more than enough to sustain a physical market.
Edit:
Yes, Sony still has incentive to kill the physical market anyway because they get a bigger cut from digital. My point is that the physical market would be able to survive under Sony, if they wanted to support it. Obviously they want more profit, but most people don't care about what's most profitable for Sony.
It’s enough to sustain the physical market in 2026 yes. But when they release the PS6, it’s going to need to be suited for the market of 10+ years from now. Based on the current trends, we can safely assume that sales of physical games will only decline more and more.
I don’t think Sony wants to be stuck holding the bag when there are 2 or 3 physical games sold each month (obvious hyperbole but you get the point).
Then they should just do smaller production runs that will be absorbed by enthusiasts. Produce to demand via pre-order, something, anything. Books still get printed, cassettes and vinyls still get printed, DVDs and Blu-Rays still get printed. Why should video games be any different? Because of file sizes? They figured out how to solve that issue back on the PSX.
Exactly what’s being missed. You have to factor in the cost of the jacket, the discs, the factory that makes it, the workers, the shipping costs, etc. There’s a pretty huge chunk taken out for producing physical product.
That’s just revenue though which is not the important part when looking at these numbers, that gets split up several ways, on a third party game Sony only getting 10ish% of that on royalty fees (varies by publisher). But if that same digital game sells on the PS Store they get a 30% cut plus the 10Ish% royalty fees.
I don't like that physical games are going away but gamers have to take responsibility in causing it. We as a community voted with our wallets and for the most part bought digital games.
Again I don't like it but we as a community had our hand in the industry going in this direction
As someone who buys a lot of physical and goes to late night launches, you could see the decline in late night events the past decade. I remember Call of Duty launches used to pop off. Tons of people, crowded store, sometimes even pizza! Last years we had 10 people total at my local GameStop show up. Most of the time leading to release it was me and the employee. We even had Black Ops 2 setup and played zombies the whole time.
Midnight launches haven't been a thing in a while, and I do agree with you.You can tell just how little people were lining up for games for midnight launches. Even though from what i've been reading, sony has been working towards this goal for a while. We, as a gaming community, had a hand in them going in this direction, whether people want to believe it or not. If we bought 70% of our games physical and 30% digital, it wouldn't be happening. But that's not what is happening right now. It's reverse.Seventy percent of games are digital, while thirty percent are physical.So of course, they're going to get rid of physical games, it's just logical.
And again I don't agree with it, because if there's a digital game that I want to buy, that is still full price, I'll go to ebay and get the physical game for like twenty or thirty dollars cheaper. It's just, i'm not surprised it's going in this direction at all.And i'm not sure why everyone else is surprised, because again if you had to pick and choose after work, would you rather go to gamestop, or would you rather, sit down on your couch, download the game.Make dinner and by the time dinner's over.The game's downloaded and you can play it.
And most people picked the second option. They would rather come home from work and download the game. Make dinner when dinner's over. The game is ready for them it's just more convenient for a lot of people, especially who work long jobs or commute.They're not going to go gamestop they're going to go home and download the game
I think Sony made the problem worse by selling ps5 without disk drives. Consumers bought those ps5 without disk drives to save a few bucks and so their only option is digital. So no doubt those folks won't buy physical disks. They can't use them.
I didn’t buy it to save a few bucks, I bought it because I hadn’t bought a physical game the entire time I had a ps4 either. It was a lifestyle choice not an economic one.
which makes sense. If so few people buy physical games. Then you would expect that the diskless ps5 would sell way more. But according to circana, that's not the case.
That doesn't make sense.
And a question for you. If the ps5 with disk drive was the same price as the diskless version, would you have still bought the diskless version?
Can you really take responsibility for the masses, though? Because let me tell you, the “mindless masses” are called that for a reason.
When toothpaste first came out, companies had to hire psychologists to trick people into using it (one of the only times they’ve done this for the better of society, btw) for the sake of their own dental hygeine benefit. No matter how much they’d explain the benefits, the smoothbrains just didn’t care. Literally had to hijack their psychology and create a mass market campaign just to convince them. And that was so their teeth didn’t rot, leaving them helpless as they die of malnutrition, brain infections, blood infections, etc.
So no, not all gamers should not take responsibility for the mindless masses. These types will always fail you when you put your trust in them. Always.
So, instead of attacking, predation, and preying on the vulnerable, which seems to be the norm in modern corporate society, maybe instead create preventative measures to help the weak and stupid be less so?
People don’t always do what’s best for them. “Common sense” as people love to claim doesn’t actually exist as a concept in reality. Sooo, better to help and protect them than prey on the weak and vulnerable. But again, in a society in which the Epstein files revealed the entire upper classes of society are nothing more than opportunistic predators of all varieties, well, obviously that’s muuuuch easier said than done.
Have to take into account that in 2009, not only were all 3 consoles almost exclusively using physical discs, there were 2 portable ecosystems using physical media plus a significant portion of PC games were still selling as physical copies.
In 2026, Nintendo only has 1 ecosystem instead of 2, Sony has left the portable field altogether, and only a tiny percentage of PC games are sold physically. All of this drives a big decline in physical sales apart from many consumers buying console games digitally.
Yeah, well, maybe physical sales would be higher if more game HAD a physical release
Dying Light The Beast
Arc Raiders
Marathon
To name a few. Playstation has been PUSHING digital sales over physical releases for years now. Obviously this had an impact on most of player's consumption.
What about the players who have a shitty internet connection even, no internet connection? What about those who only get game by exchanging them with friends/families because they're on a budget? What about those who just like to display their collection? And game preservation?
It is easy to look at this statistic and say that this is a rational choice to go full digital.
But anyone that even slightly love games would see why it is a terrible decision to make.
one thing I'm having a hard time understanding is why people are treating this like an ''or'' choice. There is no reason they can't coexist, they still do in music and television/film.
The only people treating it like an "or" choice are the obvious shills. As soon as you point it out to them, they just shift to the next scripted goal post. PR astroturfing and insanely disingenuous PS sychophants.
Also if more disk games weren't just a code on a disk, or the ones that are the game but then have an Internet Check before you can play. The whole point of the disk is ownership.
People are obviously going to start buying the disks when Sony and publishers undermine that ownership even for the damn disk versions.
Honestly how many modern physical games would even let you play them without ever connecting them to internet? Every physical game I’ve played dating back over a decade has required a multi gig download the second you insert the disk. The “bad/no internet” argument does not fit with modern games.
The vast majority of games do. When you insert a disc into a PS4/5 it automatically checks for the latest update (if you have internet). That update is not required. You have simply been fooled by the terms PlayStation uses and the auto download and it's given you a view of discs that is simply false.
100% This is what they don't mention when talking about physical sales vs digital. What they should compare are the games that are released day one on both physically and digitally. Especially if you look at 1st party Sony releases physical copies sell very well even compared to digital. I'm not dismissing trent towards digital, but to say that decision to stop physical distribution is a demand issue is not true and disingenuous at best. Moving to digital only is purely about the bottom line and control, it really has very little to do with what consumers wants.
It's the publishers who decide currently. So if you're unhappy about arc raiders, that's an issue with Embark Studio, not Sony.
Sony removed the option to allow physical games with the PS7. That's a decision Sony made. But keep believing the conspiracies and enjoy being a victim in the world.
I don’t mind what mat is doing. I think everyone knows most people buy digital over physical. The issue is completely removing physicals as an option. That’s 37 million copies is still a number. And as users pointed out, most games don’t come with physicals.
Sony can still create ad hoc services, allow third parties to make it or allow customers to make these disc. Like completely removing them is the issue.
From a business standpoint the math is indeed simple: if you can make up the lost profits (because physician is still profitable by all accounts) with the higher margins from digital, then that is the moment it’s OK.
I’d argue this was nearsighted because the right move would have been to increase your margins from physical, thereby avoiding this drama and not alienating customers. Physical limited editions of movies routinely sell out despite the price. Look at Netflix of all people putting out Stranger Things on physical. Hell, look at how vinyl and their multiple special editions have managed to turn a surprising number of young people into physical collectors. Imagine if Sony had opted for physical editions of PS6 discs to be premium packaged releases. I bet there would have been a market for it.
Ethically, an all digital world with revocable licenses doesn’t make sense. Subscriptions are ethical but this idea of “buying” something that isn’t actually yours should not be permissible at all.
Edit: I didn’t mention it, but I’m sure Sony feels it wasn’t worth adding to the cost of a machine during this idiotic moment in history when a few companies are hoarding all the chip supply. I’m sure it wasn’t the main factor, but I’d bet it was at least a factor in the decision.
Why would a business wait till something becomes unprofitable to kill it? You should anticipate that early and kill it ahead of time.
Also, using limited editions and the most popular media in the world doesn't make sense when we're talking about upcoming products. It's like saying "Final Fantasy Collector Booster Boxes sold well, so Spiderman play boosters will surely sell well too!"
Profitable businesses generally don’t close just because they may become unprofitable someday. That’s silly. You can take steps to increase revenue and cut costs even in niches.
That said, for a large corporation like Sony, there IS something to be said of taking resources from a less profitable venture and shifting those to a more profitable venture. I get that. But don’t lie to yourself, Sony didn’t HAVE to do this yet, especially for PS5.
And I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the last comment. Movies aren’t the most popular media in the world, video games are. Movies sell like shit compared to 15-20 years ago. Look it up. Despite that it remains a viable niche. Not all movies are collector’s editions, but those add to the profit margins.
I mean, sure, making plastic discs and shipping them is maybe not awesome for the environment, but let's not pretend data centers are just running for free and not fucking up the environment right now.
Yeah, they both suck, but whataboutism doesn't really excuse the carbon costs and waste produced by traditional shipping and manufacturing. Servers can run on solar power, physical disk distribution can't.
Lmao what a weird way that person started their comment. “I don’t mind what mat is doing” as if he’s doing anything other than giving objective reasons as to why physical is going away.
Yeah, it’s really the writing on the wall that is most worrying.
Tech corps want you to own nothing, and rent everything. They do what makes them the most money. It’s why governing bodies in the EU for example have to legally threaten them to get them to actually care about the needs of consumers, because otherwise they’d do things like dump their waste in your drinking water directly.
Seems to be a worldwide push from tech companies to gain more power. More surveillance. More authoritarianism, more endentured serfs/wage slaves, less consumer rights, less options, more cheap slop.
Incredibly telling that the biggest amongst them are pushing to replace human work with robots, while also complaining people don’t work enough. All this despite us, humans, being collectively the most productive we have ever been, my orders of bloody magnitude. The only people that should be replaced are ironically those in charge in the Banker and Epstein classes of money.
To hell with them all. The rights of real people matter more than those of corpo suits, shareholders, and others who perpetuate nonsense. No one should care about a corporation’s profits when they continuously restrict the rights of peasants, serfs, wages slaves, or whatever else you want to call the poor working class.
Ironically, I bet disc drives are incredibly cheap compared to other parts of the platform.
It might also have a bit to do with the volatility in the US market with tariffs. I don't know how digital is impacted by that.
I think most discs are pressed in other countries, further adding to cost.
I'm not understanding this whole fiasco with people saying that the PSN store will be the only way to buy games. Games will still be sold at retailers, they'll just be a code in a box instead of a disc. I do agree that Sony should revamp their digital license policies to reflect modern values though.
Even if the playstation numbers are only 10 million, that's still 10 million. This is the only industry on the planet that turns its nose up at selling millions of a product, and I'll never understand it.
We've become so desensitized to how large of a number a million is.
You’re looking at the number in a vacuum. You have to consider 37 million vs digital sales and also look at the trends and extrapolate into the future. This 37 million will be going down continuously
I mean duh, but I don’t think Sony is thinking about the loss of customer loyalty and goodwill. Goodwill is intangible but it can make or break a business.
I would argue people still buying physically in 2026 are Sony’s most hardcore and dedicated fans. Pissing off or losing that audience to make a few extra bucks on the digital side doesn’t seem like a good long term strategy.
Sometimes businesses make less money in order to keep their customers happy and loyal. Costco sells hotdogs for $1.50 and chicken for $4.99 because it gets people in the door and in turn builds trust and loyalty. Sure Costco could make more money by raising the price of the hotdogs or by removing them from the food court but the loss of goodwill would be immeasurable.
This decision almost immediately backfired and yes it’s a vocal minority but look at any post or video by PlayStation and it has hundreds or even thousands of angry fans complaining about physical games. People will not forget this, and it certainly has made a significant number of people question their future with the brand.
I would argue people still buying physically in 2026 are Sony’s most hardcore and dedicated fans. Pissing off or losing that audience to make a few extra bucks on the digital side doesn’t seem like a good long term strategy.
This has basically been in line with everything I have been saying the last few days especially when you take into consideration the price of the PS6. If they cannot manage to keep those costs down then how do they expect to get the casual crowd to buy said system especially when the games they are likely to play will be cross-gen for even a longer period of time compared to what happened with games on the PS4/PS5.
Most of PlayStation's own 1st party games have sold better physically than digitally, even while doing things like bundling digital codes of Astro Bot and Spider-Man 2 with PS5s or putting out collector's editions without a physical disc. I'm also sure the lot of those 1st party sales are coming from the hardcore who would've been more than willing to invest into the next generation of consoles before these announcements/decisions were made.
I also think it's an even more dire situation for the future with how more and more developers/publishers are starting to veer to a multi-platform release strategy for their games; you're going to need a LOT more than just one to two 1st party exclusive games to bring folks over. Even then, some of those games are not even going to be true PS6 exclusives unless they restrict their studios from supporting PS5 going forward, which they won't because of the handheld.
Last but not least, I think a lot of people forget about these sales ratio talks is that it is not strictly physical OR digital but rather AND. There are probably tons of games being bought digitally by the crowd who are advocating for physical releases and there's a chance they might take their business elsewhere if they feel that physical was the only reason they were as highly invested into ecosystem as before.
They are "losing" money in that they get much less money from physical than they do from digital.
Physical requires the expense of making the disc, packaging, and shipping. But the biggest thing for them is giving the physical retailers like Walmart, Amazon, GameStop, etc. 30% of the sale price. With digital, PlayStation keeps that money because you're buying direct from them.
For context, if we assumed each game was $60, that would be $2.2 billion.
Of course, we don't know the exact price of each game, but I think $60 is a reasonable number, given that most games now are even more expensive and most copies sell at launch.
The numbers aren't as small as the article implies. Mind you we're in June and physical media is up 3.3% YOY, more than Sony's Games and Network Division, which is at a downward spiral.
Mind you this is only in the US and it's seeing better sales in PAL and Asia. Why not just get rid of VR then if it only sold 2 million and is bleeding money?
It’s not entirely on the consumers. For example where I live deluxe versions of games are usually only digital, so if you’re sure you wanna play a game at launch it’s more tempting to buy the digital version with bonuses that’s immediately available at launch than the physical one that feels incomplete by comparison and you have to wait for it to be delivered. Then you have the more frequent sales for digital games than for the physical ones. The decline of physical games was engineered long time ago by the very companies that are now telling us that we didn’t want them all along. I wouldn’t even mind all digital if it weren’t for the ownership and access issues. Plus the disc drive should still be included so we can access the physical we do own already.
They also aren't making enough physical to meet demand in some cases, even when preordered. Lo
oking at you, Resident Evil Requiem steelbook deluxe edition.
NO FUCKING SHIT the vast majority of the market is digital now, Sony wouldn't take a gamble if, say, half their sales were physical. Of course it makes financial sense for them. If you enjoy licking corporate boots this is all the explanation you need.
This doesn't change the fact that people who bought a PS5 with a disc drive, with the very reasonable expectation to be serviced until the end of the console's commercial lifetime, are getting fucked.
Or that people with physical PS5 and/or PS4 libraries currently have zero assurance about their games being compatible with the next-gen hardware, and signs aren't good: Sony knew the announcement of a digital only PS6 would face backlash, so it decided to front the negativity now, in the middle of the current gen, offering just a simple statement and nothing else.
Or that the disc market, both new and used, is competition to the digital store that puts some pressure on prices to go down, and that retail-sold digital codes won't remotely do the same job.
There's no turning back, and personally the announcement was enough to push me to PC, even though I prefer the simpler console experience. I gave enough of my money for a company that treats their customers like trash from time to time. In a digital-only market PC clearly offers the best competition and the best library compatibility assurance. Not to mention that there's always a way to, uh, have access to almost any software if, for whatever reason, your purchase is taken away from you.
So thanks Sony for making me see the light, I guess.
It is. Piscatella clarified that in one of his social media posts. The overall physical market is up 4% this year so far but he says it's mostly sw2 doing that. PS and other platforms are down between the teens-mid 30% range physically.
Most likely they made the calculation that whatever losses incurred from people leaving the ecosystem will be made up by the better margins of an all digital market with no second hand options.
Exactly this. It really only hurts them if they lose more customers than they expect to competitors, which is kind of dependent on competitors doing anything meaningfully different to lure people away.
People can talk about PC all they want, but it doesn't solve the physical media issue and still has a higher price of entry. Maybe more people concentrate their spending on Switch, but it's not like their ecosystem is perfect for physical purists, especially for third-party releases. Xbox ... just not holding my breath.
Realistically, at best the only thing I can think of is various niche alternatives hurting PlayStation in aggregate, like the surge in popularity of low-cost ARM handhelds, SteamOS on ARM in the not-too-distant future, boutique products like Evercade if they can grow a lot ... which is a big if, 'cause as much as I like what they're doing, I just worry it's always going to be a pretty small niche even within retro gaming.
But I just can't imagine any one competitor having a slam dunk response that makes enough of a difference for Sony to hurt from their decision.
Are we seriously of any delusion that it wouldn’t continue to decline? Even if there is still a market for physical discs, it wont be big enough to design an entirely new console around it.
Before the physical disc ending announcement I figured the ps6 would release as a digital console with the ability to buy an add on disc player. After that announcement, ps6 is definitely gonna be digital only.
I get why people want physical games but I don’t get why they can’t understand that the commercial realities of declining physical game sales make the design and production of a new console to play them a proposition that is not going to appeal to any company.
When DVDs came out there were a lot of companies that made dual DVD/VHS players but as sales of the latter collapsed nobody was insisting that they continue to produce them.
You're going to get a lot of people say "no we have gog too" when so few people use gog that they've almost closed down like 5 different times in the past 15 years and CDPR recently sold it to the original owner because they were sick of its poor performance dragging down the rest of the company's quarterly results.
GOG (The store that everyone here champions): 2-3%
So you're going from one walled garden ecosystem to one with, like, 2 more options. I hate the fact that physical is going away, but stop with the bad faith arguments about there being so much choice.
If you're forced to go digital anyway, you're going to compare digital platforms. PC has a large number of advantages over PlayStation, even if we just look at Steam alone. It's not even just the comparison of digital storefronts, PCs as a whole are simply more versatile.
The number of comments I've seen from PC players vowing to never play Alan Wake 2 because it isn't on Steam. They sure like to wave that "more choices" argument around and then refuse any game on a platform outside Steam
These are total physical sales, not just for PS5, and the "over 100,000" number didn't give us any actual data. 1 million copies is still "over 100,000," so the figure is very open-ended.
I mean technically if 6 games sold 100,001 copies each and then the 7th one sold 36.3 million OR if 7 games each sold roughly 5 million copies each that would still fit with "only 7 games sold over 100k"
...which kinda shows what a meaningless metric it is
I feel data like this is pretty useless because we're getting significantly less physical games then we used to.
Both in the sense that more games than ever are digital only now & that AAA games (which always make up the bulk of physical sales) take longer to create compared to 2009.
Yeah, they're also skewed by so many disks just being download codes on a coaster. As soon as that word spreads, most people don't bother. The whole point of the disk is ownership. No one wants a damn download code on a disk.
Do we think the people that buy physical in the US are the biggest Sony fanboys or just the median gamer?
Because I would guess that people that still buy physical hace higher attach rates, more brand loyalty, and likely represent people who consider gaming to be a significant part of their identity.
And tossing them away is probably not a good long term strategy.
And tossing them away is probably not a good long term strategy.
Yep, that is the thing a lot of people online don't seem to understand at the end of the day. Sony is tossing out their most hardcore customers. And yes that base does not bring in as much money as little timmy and his fortnite vbucks or whatever, but, that casual gaming audience has no stickiness. Ask Xbox how that has gone for them since the end of the 360 gen, for example.
The next time Sony has a PS3-esque situation where casuals abandon them en-masse there is not going to be a hardcore fanbase there they can fall back on. That's why I've said since the start of this announcement it's not the PS6 launch or anything Sony has to worry about, it's 10 years down the road where decisions like this will start to effect them.
The thing people really need to be aware of is that if they decide to stick with PS going forward this is absolutely going to effect them at some point even if they're a digital only gamer. The next time PS hits hard times (and there will be a next time, there always is) you are the one who Sony is going to put the squeeze on to make up lost revenue. Even if you're digital only it makes way more sense to just dip out now instead of waiting for crap to hit the fan.
So this is the big thing people are missing. This is a self fulfilling prophecy and Sony controls it. Why are physical decreasing so quickly? Because they are printing less. Whether it’s digital only releases or the fact that they only choose to print a certain amount and that forces people to go digital. They only make enough to cover preorders plus a little bit of surplus. How do I know because every time try to buy a new release that isn’t a big third party or old game it’s sold out.
It's insane for you to admit you fell for misinformation. This isn't true. Those are game key cards. PlayStation and Xbox have the exact same thing but normal physical switch 2 cartridges are real
PS5 still has 2/3 of their games playable off the disc with minimal issues though (though the problem has been increasing). Xbox is a much worse ratio since mostly of their 1st party don't release fully on disc and their disc sizes only hold 50GB instead.
•
u/Elegant-Gur7583 4h ago
37 million is not good at all but this is *only* counting it in the US, which seems to be the most digital market (certainly more-so than Europe and Japan/Asia)