| brute said:
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. If we compare ratios to games that have both a physical and digital release, exclude DLC, then we can see it still favors physical. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-11-19-playstation-5-owners-prefer-boxed-games-to-downloads 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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I don't want to spend too long arguing in this thread as the demise of physical is inevitable to me, we live in a digital world now. My mind isn't going to be changed because the growth of digital is clear as day to me and I doubt people championing physical are going to have their minds changed either, that will take a few years for more evidence to stack up. So I don't think there's going to be much point in posting endlessly in debate.
Just want to say that ratio is everything in this discussion. Because as the ratio rises the amount of total sales needed to meet 10m physical exponentially increases. Total sales are irrelevant if digital ratio continue to rise as it has been. I.E once you reach 99% digital sales you would need to sell 1 billion copies to sell 10m physical. The only thing that matters for the end of physical is the continued rise of digital ratio and the only argument for physical not disappearing is the digital ratio will stop rising.
So even if this happens:
2021: 400m physical software, 400m digital software
2022: 410m physical software, 450m digital software.
Yes physical software numerically increased but that's just due to overall software increasing likely due to the specific titles released. The digital ratio is continuing to rise and that's all that matters.
Digital Ratio IS rising for all platform holders and if it continues to rise the end of physical is inevitable. Whether you believe that will take 10 years or 40 years.
But the idea that physical media will even exist in 2060 is a crazy notion. I'd be surprised if the successor to the Switch 2 even has a physical drive, much less their console 6 generations down the road. (Though this is assuming consoles as we know them even exist in 2060).
Publishers and Platform Holders will be pushing digital more and more as the years go by also, they have more control of digital titles and I'm sure they'd love to not have to produce and organise shipping millions of boxes of games around the world for no reason.
So it all boils down to just one thing. If you think digital ratio is increasing now and will keep increasing, physical will die. If you think digital ratio is increasing now but will stop, then you can say physical will survive.
But in 40 years the idea of having to produce and ship millions of physical copies around the world and for users to have to put in a physical object into their consoles and swap discs/cartridges is going to seem archaic and relegated to retro consoles.
People need to remember how far technology has come since 1980 and really ask themselves if they can truly see physical media surviving another 40 years to vote "never". Otherwise we will wait and with every fiscal year that passes and every report of every game like Animal Crossing selling "50% digital!, 60% digital!, 70% digital!" perhaps some will begin to change their mind.
To quickly address the GSD post, from the same article you posted:
"Digital's lead can also be seen in the cumulative sales from January 2019 to August 2021. Across those 32 months, 102 million full games were sold digitally, compared to 81 million boxed games"
Looking at one console, one year, etc isn't enough to see trends. In-fact the data for PS5 physical outselling digital can just as easily be used to support that we are moving towards digital, as the digital ratio is still higher than the PS4 was in it's first year.
Last edited by Zippy6 - on 21 November 2021
