| Zippy6 said:
As we can see, the trend is clear. Physical software is dying, just like the movie/tv and music industries digital will become dominant and physical releases will become extremely niche. The digital ratio will rise high enough that even the biggest releases will not be able to hit the 10m physical sales mark. Even the biggest releases like Mario Kart that sell 40m will be under 10m physical once they reach 80% digital and beyond. The ratio will continue to rise for all platform holders until the point is reached that the ratio is so high a game would have to sell an astronomical amount to possibly reach 10m physical sales. Physical is dying, the trend is clear, anyone who thinks physical will continue to be relevant to the point of managing 10m+ sellers is deluding themselves because they want physical to remain relevant. Seeing PlayStation digital go from 19% to 65% in 5 years how could anyone possibly think physical will remain strong enough by 2060 to vote "never". Video Games will follow the other industries in leaving physical behind. The all digital future already happened on PC years ago. Nintendo confirms 50% digital sales for Animal Crossing: New Horizons | GamesIndustry.biz For those curious this is how the music industry has switched away from physical over time: source
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Do you have actual numbers to support that physical is dying? Such as total sales of physical games? Or all you have to go by is ratio? Ratio means nothing if software sales keeps on increasing year over year as well as the big companies manipulating the numbers to make it look like physical is dying.
The digital ratio includes stuff like DLC, microtransactions and digital only games.
If we compare ratios to games that have both a physical and digital release, exclude DLC, then we can see it still favors physical.
Physical for video games is here to stay, 10s of millions of physical games are sold year. People need to stop with this nonsense that physical is dying.
We know Switch owners mostly buy physical over digital, but it seems PS5 gamers do as well, once we exclude stuff like DLC and microtransactions from the "ratio"
I'd be curious if we have YOY sales of physical games, but for now the below will do to prove that physical isnt going anywhere.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-11-19-playstation-5-owners-prefer-boxed-games-to-downloads
"PlayStation fans across Europe and beyond heavily favour retail for their game purchases, with more than ten million boxed games sold in the console's first ten months on sale.
The figure comes from Global Sales Data's presentation at GI Live: London last month, where the firm's video games consultant Sam Naji took a deeper look at the console's cumulative sales from its launch in November 2020 to the end of August 2021.
GSD tracks full-game boxed sales from 23 countries and digital sales from 49 and covers all the major publishers.
The company found that retail has consistently outsold digital, with 51% more boxed games sold than downloads by the end of August.
November 2020 was the only month where full-game downloads have outperformed retail sales at 950,000 units compared to 840,000. After this, PS5's retail games have consistently outsold digital every month.
And the gap has widened over time. In December 2020, five retail games were sold for every four downloads. By the end of August, this had increased to three boxed games for ever two digital.
In total, 10.14 million boxed games were sold for PS5 between launch and end of August. December, January, June, July and August all saw more than one million games sold within the month.
Meanwhile, 7.51 million digital games were sold during the same period -- and no single month saw more than one million sales."
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