The beginning of the end

Looking back, it’s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare were already showing console gamers’ willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.

By the time the PlayStation Vita launched in 2012, Sony required that all publishers that make physical game cartridges also offer a downloadable option. Subsequent consoles like the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One continued that trend, and by the end of the 2010’s physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent. In recent years, some big-budget games have been skipping a retail release altogether or offering “download in a box” retail options like Switch 2’s Game Key Cards or Grand Theft Auto VI‘s printed download codes.

Over the last 15 years or so, console gamers have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets in favor of all these digital download options, preferring the convenience of not leaving the house to purchase a game (or leaving the couch to switch to a new title) over the permanence of games on discs and cartridges. The shift has been so strong that many of today’s console gamers are fine skipping the disc drive entirely; Piscatella shared today that 27 percent of all PS5 hardware and 52 percent of all Xbox Series hardware sold in the US so far has been “Digital Only” editions.

None of this data will be of much comfort to the small but passionate group of console gamers who still buy games they can hold in their hands. But the numbers pretty clearly explain why Sony doesn’t seem worried about losing what is, financially speaking, a rather small segment of its current gaming business.