The era of playing a game off a disc might basically be over.
The era of playing a game off a disc might basically be over.
One of Sony’s best-ever PlayStation ads is a 21-second video titled, “Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video.” It’s a “step-by-step” guide about how to lend your PS4 games to your friends. It has one step: one person hands another person a game box.
The ad succinctly clowns on Microsoft’s original and convoluted game sharing policy for the Xbox One, which let users ditch discs in exchange for daily DRM checks. The idea was so hated that Microsoft walked it back just over a week after the release of Sony’s ad and months before the console came out. The lesson was simple — don’t mess with people’s discs.
But more than a decade later, it’s not hard to imagine a future where Sony’s own ad doesn’t apply anymore.
Physical game sales in 2024 were less than half what they were as recently as 2021, and the market has been in decline since 2008, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella tells The Verge. “There has been a long trend of declining sales in physical games,” Piscatella says. “And now there’s declining distribution with retailers pulling back space, with companies making fewer physical games overall, and with the entire shift towards digital distribution.”
The writing has been on the wall since 2020, when Microsoft and Sony introduced their (at the time) next-generation Xbox and PlayStation consoles with versions that didn’t have a place to put your discs. Ultimately, they were responding to the emerging trend of people buying fewer physical games for consoles. Can you even remember the last time you bought a physical game for PC?
The primary reason for the shift to digital is because of connectivity: about 99 percent of consoles are connected to the internet, Piscatella says. (Players weren’t quite as online a decade ago.) And once people got used to digital, “more and more often people would choose convenience over the practical positives of physical.”
Just look at this graph from Piscatella showing plummeting physical sales. The outlook is grim.
Microsoft hasn’t been particularly secretive about its interest in a heavily digital future. The latest Xbox generation launched with the all-digital Series S, and it added an all-digital Series X option last year. Microsoft’s “This is an Xbox” campaign positions basically every device with a screen as a potential console. The company’s Xbox Game Pass subscription is essentially a rental service for digital titles. And physical editions of Avowed, one of Microsoft’s biggest Xbox games of the year, only have a code for the game in the box.
Of course, Microsoft is best known as a software company, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that it might want to bank its video game future entirely on digital games. And while I still think it will be a shame if the next Halo isn’t available on a disc, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that Xbox could drop discs entirely by the end of the decade.
Sony will probably take a little bit longer to make the all-digital jump. The company is certainly signaling it wants to move in that direction, perhaps most strongly by shipping the premium $699 PS5 Pro without a disc drive. But it continues to sell drives separately for the Pro and for the slim PS5. And the company would simply face pushback on a different scale than Microsoft: there are far more PS4s and PS5s out there than Xboxes, and that means a lot more people who have bought a lot more physical games who may want ways to play them for the foreseeable future.
Piscatella also points out that some major mass-market games like EA Sports College Football and Call of Duty have a “pretty big physical presence” that console makers may not want to jeopardize.
Nintendo is where we see the argument for physical games — though maybe not discs — sticking around. The just-announced Switch 2 has a cartridge slot and is backward-compatible with Switch 1 games. The console’s first generation lasted from 2017 until sometime this year, so if the Switch 2’s lifecycle also lasts eight years, physical media will be relevant for Nintendo well into the 2030s.
The company may have reason to stick with cartridges for even longer. Piscatella says that Nintendo platforms are still “heavier physical” than other platforms because its audience, especially families, expects the format; it’s a lot easier for kids in a family to share a game when they can just pass the cart to each other, as Sony adeptly showed in its ad. That advantage won’t last forever, though. Just last week, Nintendo announced a “virtual game card” lending system that lets family members share digital games.
It’s yet another sign that physical media is waning, even in its strongholds. “At this point, the consumers on PlayStation and Xbox are speaking with their dollars that digital-first is a fine way to go,” Piscatella says.
Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox did not respond to requests for comment on their future plans for physical media.
While physical media sales are on the decline, New York University games professor Joost van Dreunen points out that the sales of physical video game accessories have been “skyrocketing.” The PC games market may be mostly digital on Steam, but sales of things like custom controllers, screens, chairs, and headphones are a “huge category,” he says.
He believes that accessories and what he calls “the personalization of the physical experience of games and interactivity” will grow, which we can see manifested all the way to theme parks. (van Dreunen points out that Nintendo is particularly good at this: think Amiibo, the Alarmo clock, and theme parks filled with Nintendo goodies.)
Both van Dreunen and Piscatella ultimately made the comparison of video games to vinyl records, which is “kind of like on the extreme niche, but doing ok,” Piscatella says. There’s a key difference between vinyl and video games, of course — with a vinyl record, you can play it on a turntable, but a physical cart of Super Mario Odyssey can only slot into a Nintendo Switch. It’s more about the enthusiast crowd focusing on physical media.
Maybe that will be enough to keep physical formats around into the future. But the next time Sony makes a guide on how to share PlayStation games, I doubt it will be a crisp 21 seconds.