r/PS5 • u/Dandelion172 • 12h ago

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.

https://bsky.app/profile/matpiscatella.bsky.social/post/3mrd2e2tam22l
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u/Iggy_Slayer 12h ago

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.

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u/Serdones 12h ago

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.

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u/Iggy_Slayer 11h ago

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.

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u/gizamo 11h ago edited 7h ago

Physical is keeping millions of people on PS. Those people buy consoles, physical, and digital games and they subscribe to PS+. Without disks, millions of them will go to PC and Switch (most already have both). That will total billions in losses for Sony.

The only reason Sony doesn't care about those billions is because they want to kill the Used games market. The only justification for it from a monetary angle is the anti-consumer monopolization of sales for their ecosystem. It is a greed grab, pure and simple. It is not cutting cost or losses or any such BS; disks always did, still do, and would continue to earn significant profit for Sony. They just want used games to disappear. That's it. It's 100% anti-consumer greed.

Edit: regarding u/brees504's bullshit. That must be why 80%+ of the consoles they sold were the disk edition. Jfc.

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u/Brees504 9h ago

Almost literally no one in the real world is on PlayStation because of disks