Support Physical Games

[Shadow1980]

SanAndreasX said:

And that argument was brought up 20 years ago.

It fell on stone-deaf ears, as did the early warnings about what Steam would do to physical media. 

Consoles and PC aren't the same thing. You're not locked into a single ecosystem on PC. That competition incentivizes digital storefronts to do right by their customers, because they could always go elsewhere without having to buy a new device. Also, there was never a huge used games market on PC, namely because the first-sale doctrine never applied to PC software (at least in the U.S.).

Meanwhile, consoles are a walled garden. You buy one, and you're locked into that ecosystem. You buy a PS5 and you can only buy from the PS Store. There's no incentive to do right by customers. They've already sunk hundreds of dollars into the hardware, and to change storefronts they'd have to buy a competing console, only to end up in another walled garden. Also, their digital games are tied to that platform. If you decide to ditch PlayStation entirely and sell off your console, you might recoup some of that cost for the hardware, but if all your games were digital you're never getting that money back. That incentivizes users to stick with their current ecosystem, for better or for worse. A friend of mine argued that's why last generation was the worst generation for Xbox to lose a lot of market share, because with the increase in digital sales more and more people are going to have their purchases attached to an account rather than to a disk that you own and can sell off. Sunk costs are a massive factor on consoles.

Also, there's always been a huge used games market for physical games (estimated value of $7.2 billion in 2025). People have been selling, trading, lending, and gifting their physical games for well over 40 years by this point. A substantial portion of my games library are hand-me-downs (including my Intellivision and all of its games, and more than a few of my NES games) or were purchased from the second-hand market.

TL;DR: The nature of PC gaming easily lent itself to people voluntarily switching to digital without much fuss. The nature of consoles makes it to where a digital-only ecosystem has to be forced, and recent events have made it clear that publishers are willing to take digital purchases on consoles away from people. It is not an apples-to-apples comparison, even if they both involve video games.

P.S.: Some video game companies are also exaggerating the disparity between physical and digital (e.g., including digital-only games, counting GKCs as digital, including PC copies), making physical seem irrelevant when it clearly isn't. While getting exact numbers is difficult, based on what I've pieced together from financial reports the physical market in the 4/25-3/26 fiscal year amounted to at least 200M copies worldwide, 70M of that just on PlayStation and over 110M on Switch 1 & 2 combined. That may be a lot less than the well over 300M from the Gen 5 peak in 2004 across the PS2, GC, & Xbox (shipments were 227M for the PS2, 50M for the GC, and an unknown amount for the Xbox, but it had to be at least as much as the GC), but it's not peanuts, and certainly not total collapse. And that's with other caveats like the number of new games made for retail-release having dwindled significantly from many publishers compared to 20+ years ago as games take longer and longer to develop (as a particularly extreme example, compare five GTA games released from GTA3 in 2001 to GTA5 in 2013, and now we're only getting GTA6 13 years after GTA5).