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Kyuu 20 hours ago
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DekutheEvilClown said:
Kyuu said:

Digital was promoted by PC gaming, cheaper digital-only consoles, and a deliberate reduction of physical game shipments aimed to artificially increase the digital share, give both platform holders and game publishers larger cuts (no retailers cuts and printing costs getting in the way), then make it seem like a very few want physical to remain an option. MTX and bundles count towards digital, not to mention thousands of games aren't available physically. These data are heavily skewed and don't really tell us enough about how much people actually value physical.

I'd wager well over a 100 million people still value discs/cards. I myself haven't bought a single physical game on PS5, but I do value them, to the point that PS6 not supporting discs may be a deal-breaker to me even as someone who skipped the PS5 because I intended to go straight to PS6 (I kept waiting for a PS5 pricecut and all we got instead was one hike after another).

Thanks to Sony's decisions, PS4 may be my last owned Playstation. If you look at my PS5 library, you'd assume that physical is a complete non-factor to me, but you would be wrong.

Sony's bet is that the vast majority of physical fans will be angry, but not angry enough to make the jump to other platforms. And 3rd party publishers don't give a fuck if PS fans switched to other platforms, they're just happy that a larger percentage of their games will be sold digitally regardless lol.

The bolded part is incorrect. MTX are not counted in the digital ratio, which is full game software only. PlayStation actually makes more revenue from Add-on content(how it’s listed in their accounts) than all digital and physical software combined(also of note: PS Plus generates roughly 6x as much revenue for Sony as all physical sales do) 

As for bundled software, it’s actually counted as physical sales in the stats, even if it’s a digital code. The digital sales ratio is full game software sold on PSN divided by total software. So the “physical” number encompasses everything that isn’t a digital sale on PSN. This is part of the reason why Sony first party games have such low digital ratios. 

I wasn't talking specifically about the data from Sony's reports, but also other data that people sometimes use to argue that digital is dominant. Too much information gets omitted to inflate digital's significanace and downplay physical.

But I had no idea that bundles are counted as physical in Sony's reports. I guess this helps explaining why physical seemed to tie digital in their FY2024 user spending.

Counting MTX and services, digital is indeed dominant even on Playstation, but the data remains too misleading to reflect the reality of how much the average Playstation gamer values physical. The fact that PS5 disc drive edition dominates the cheaper digital edition is a strong evidence in and of itself that most of us still want physical as an option, but it's being downplayed by some as "They're just choosing it to play their old PS4 discs" as if backwards compatibility is such a huge deal (It isn't. PS4 had no BC with PS3 and it dominated the Xbox One. A tiny fraction of gamers play old PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One games on their successor consoles. New physical games >>> physical backcompat in significance).