Hard evidence that digital distribution is slowly taking over for physical copies.

[flashfire926]

Hiku said:

flashfire926 said:

Now, we have numbers from the platform holder itself. In FY 2015, 19% of software sold on PS4 was via digital distribution. In just two years, that number has increased to 32% for FY 2017. That's a significant change in such a short time.

Games you get for free with PS+ count as a sale. (You get a confirmation e-mail saying "Thank you for your purchase".)
As the PS4 userbase grows, so do the number of PS+ subscriptions. I'm not saying this accounts for everything, but it should be a factor. A few games a month can add up to quite a lot, considering a few years ago I believe the average system owner bought c.a. 5 games in the console's lifetime. But when game's are free, there's another incentive there.

Aside from more people preferring digital more often, which is also a factor, that also means there are more people who buy some of their games both physically and digitally. Me for example after playing Nier: Automata digitally decided to buy a physical copy of it because I loved it so much.

Soon enough, physical copies of games will become obsolete.

Not any time soon. You can look at the music industry for example, where the primary way to listen to music is digitally, and yet they still make tons of money on physical music album sales.

Good point there. However, as earlier discussed in the thread, Sony doesn't count most digital-only games in that ratio.

For example: Lets make up a random month for PS+. Lets say Bloodborne and Firewatch are on PS+ free games. Bloodborne would get counted, but not Firewatch.

Anyways, good point, PS+ free games that are physically available would count towards the total then, supposedly.

As for the last part, here's the thing: I actually think we are going to lose the disc drive from console in 10-15 years. May just be a hunch, of course. Developing countries have that have less-than-average internet connections, will of course be a factor in pushing that back, perhaps to 15-20 years. But I'm heavily doubt that Fifa 40 will ever come out on a disc.