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.

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

I guess what I'm thinking of is that console sales themselves were down in 2025, particularly the holiday.  My mistake.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

@twintail
If (and only if) the physical $953M figure really represents the 15% cut vs the digital $6.35B representing the entire revenue (which in this case equal to consumer spending, or 100%), this means Physical tied Digital in popularity that year. This "$953M" is as misleading as it gets, it more represents "profit before tax" than revenue or consumer spending.

Brawndo. It's what plants crave!...

Matt P. is committing a perfect example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy here. Instead of showing all the data he is zeroing in on the data that tells the story he wants to tell. "Only 7 games sold over 100K in the U.S. over the last 6 months.” That’s fairly manipulative wording with veiled data. He’s picking a lower number and lumping the top 7 selling games into a category quantified by the 7th best selling game.

I have some questions. How much of the games market is the USA? Half? Forty percent? How much will these " barely over 100,000" games sell by the end of the year? How much of this is a result of the USA economy being in the shitter? How many of these games were readily available? Did companies even print enough copies to satisfy the market? Is 2026 even a good year for quality AAA titles on PS5?

I love people coming out of the woodwork to make the numbers look bad for physical. Not understanding that all that will do is further convince the people who are already on board with a digital only future and nobody else. Just non gamers looking at some data and trying to do damage control for billion dollar companies. So only 7 Playstation games sold over 100K physical. Not by how much more, just over that amount. Making it look like they didnt sell much more than that. I guess Ghost Of Yotei must have been a huge failure then since 35% of sales were physical. So that game sold like 300K...