Overall GT7 had a better launch than GT Sport in the UK but the digital sales were almost 3x more than back in 2017 when GT Sport, an online focused GT, released.

I'm quite surprised how much digital sales increased in the gaming market in 5 years.

Source: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2022-03-10-elden-ring-downloads-keep-gran-turismo-7-from-no-1-uk-digital-charts

Also interesting to see that the launches (digital+physical) of Elden Ring, Horizon Forbidden West and GT7 were relatively close taking the number 1, 2 and 3 spot of the year.

I'm convinced this console generation will be the last to have physical media. It wasn't a coincidence that both Microsoft and Sony released this gen with a digital only console option. And since this gen may very well last longer due to the global shortage, it seems to be all but guaranteed. Every year those digital sales when it comes to game purchases goes up and up.

Nintendo most likely will be the longest to hold out, but even they're seeing rises in digital purchases of their games every year.

Na, they'll still be a disc version. They'll just focus on digital as the main model and price the disc version $100 over it and sell it in limited quantities. So a ps5 disc and Series CDX would be $599 for example.

The backlash at not even proving an option would be huge.

Doubtful. We have to few consoles sold. As far as we know the early adopters could just lean more to digital.

I know the yourger the audience the more likely they are to go digital so its a matter of time. But disk drives are so inexpensive that theres no reason to alianate the gamers who dont want all digital. The most I see is the digital version being the most produced. 

Nah. People are still too attached to physical media. Plus a lot of people either don't have adequate Internets, or they have data caps.

The 25th anniversary edition is very nice, great addition to my GT collection. But I also bought the standard digital version for convenience. Best of both worlds.

The game itself however, quite unfinished imo. Atm it has less content than GT Sport... But dynamic weather is a game changer, very cool.

Not sure about ps6. If they want backwards compatibility, which I think will happen if they keep the same architecture, they would need to keep a disc based console option. But maybe PS7.

Really hard to tell, including a disc drive just cost money. For Playstation as an example we see a growth of digital sales (excluding only digital games sales)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1202234/global-playstation-game-unit-sales-digital-downloads/

The shelves with games are becoming smaller in my region and game stores are turning more and more into merchandise stores. 

Well it is still early Gen we will see what the next years bring.

I already finished all content and haven't even played all that much. GT7 only has 4 new tracks over GT Sport. Sure, it will take a long time to collect all the cars thanks to the broken game economy, yet the amount of events is not good at all. Payouts are also all over the place, 5K for a long race, 75K (highest) for a much shorter race. Difficulty doesn't matter.

But you can of course create custom races. Problem is, payouts are so low in custom races (Max 123K for 4 hour endurance race at the highest difficulty settings) that you basically have to grind the one unicorn event to be able to afford cars. (600K for a GR.3 car plus tires)

It's not off to a good start. The latest patch broke rally events (not starting on dirt tires anymore) and screwed up the physics.

I tried that 50 times with different assists and approaches, simply doesn't work as the demonstration shows. Max possible is bronze now.

Stuff will be fixed, but patch 1.06 seems to have broken more than fixed...

Yikes, sounds rough. And you know more about GT than most here AFAIK. Sad to see they broke the in game economy, probably to rush people to MTX. Thankfully it can all be fixed with updates.