By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
twintail on 20 July 2026
Edit Thread
BraLoD said:
Kyuu said:

According to this:

https://www.eurogamer.net/as-playstation-physical-game-sales-drop-its-no-wonder-sony-is-pushing-digital-only-consoles

They made about $953 million from physical in the fiscal year ending March 2025. If physical revenue only takes into account their cut (which is 15%, not 30%), this means people actually paid around $6.3 billion for physical, which is virtually tied with digital (not counting mtx, dlc, subscription etc).

Profit wise, platform holders make twice as much money from a 3rd party digital sale than a physical sale of the same software... and this is what Sony is salivating over. They want every 3rd party dollar sale to give them 30% instead of the 15% from physical. They can't take a larger cut from physical because publishers already give retailers a reported 30% cut in addition to disc/cartridge manufacturing costs.

One definitely can't say its still trending down after the last result is up, much less it's only going to continue to trend down, like you said.

I understand the profit is much higher for digital and that is a major factor for the decision, I simply don't see any kind of justification to get rid of it simply by how well or not physical is performing by itself, purely about it that it's a very big ammount of money being said good bye too, in the proccess of also damaging your brand too.

This is essentially an outlier in the data. It doesn't change the projected trend just because it happens once. It needs to happen again before we can move the data from being an outlier to being consistent with a trend. Right now, it isn't, therefore the trend can't be said to have changed.

Whether it's a lot of money is not easy to tell though. No one appears to have any data on what it costs Sony to get that revenue. We also have a lot of other data points that prove that physical is becoming less desirable. If physical is not nearly as important as some in this thread claim it to be, then the damage to the brand is probably not nearly as high either.

Kyuu said:
twintail said:

Wouldn't Sony's revenue from digital game sales (nothing else) be $6.5 billion+- (if my calculations are correct)? That would mean that people paid significantly more for digital than they did for physical 

For FY 2024 (ending March 2025), digital revenue is $6.35~ billion per this article. They had digital software revenue at 20% from the total, and the total was $31.77 billion.

31.77 x 0.2 = 6.354

But you are comparing FULL physical spend vs. revenue only digital spend. That seems pretty meaningless in the grand scale of things, no? Either we're comparing Sony's revenue between the 2 medium, or we're comparing the full consumer spend on both. 

G2ThaUNiT said:

Well that's sad 7 months into the year. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if more physical games are sold in Japan than they are the rest of the world combined. Or at the very least a good chunk of it.

And this is before Take2's whole GTA6 is digital only and in a year with RE9, Pokopia, Crimson Desert. To a lesser extent there's 007, Pragmata, MLB.
KManX89 said:
twintail said:

adding ads to games (which appears to come from a patent) and forcing people into a subscription just to play games (which is quite frankly the most laughable suggestion)

You say that like they didn’t literally just paywall the Crunchyroll store behind subscriptions or they aren’t already cramming ads on every digital platform and charging premium prices to skip them.

Again, I’d be surprised if they don’t do this at some point in the PS6’s lifecycle. Or if it’s not through ad paywalls, then a similar form of enshittification will almost-assuredly take its place.

I mean, we're talking about a video streaming service here. But I understand the concern and underlying point being made.