For physical software, it’s super hard to buy it if stores aren’t stocking it.
The Xbox section doesn’t really exist at Target, Walmart, or Costco anymore, and it’s on the way out at Best Buy. Naturally that’s going to have an impact on sales.
Further, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn’t. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.
On the hardware side, I already have this generations worth of hardware (PS5, XSX, Steam Deck), and I’m not interested in all the baggage on the Switch 2.
Plus, hardware prices are up.
So the surprise would be if sales hadn’t gone down.
and of course, this will be misconstrued. The executives will shout “look! people don’t want physical ownership!” and the push to digital rentals will continue… and result in even higher prices when they pull a Netflix.
If it goes all digital next generation I won’t be bothering. I didn’t leave gaming, gaming is leaving me.
Cool, cool, plenty of backlog to get through…
This is misplacing cause and effect. The shift to digital has been happening for years now. They cut physical production because fewer people were buying it.
Execs genuinely couldn‘t care less about what people want. They are the architects of this trend away from physical media.
I’m making the prediction that any hardware that isn‘t essentially just a screen that connects to the internet will become more and more expensive to the point no one can afford them. Major brands that we all know and use today will withdraw from manufacturing end consumer products.
I‘m guessing 10 years from now virtually everyone will be forced into cloud service subscriptions for gaming because the hardware to run these games won‘t be sold to us anymore. For a while Chinese companies might try fill the void the likes of Nvidia and AMD left but that will be short lived too.
You will go retro and learn to take care of your soon old timer hardware that will become ever more pricey to fix as spare parts get more rare and ridiculously expensive expensive or you will own nothing and be happy with that.
Yes this is all speculative but it‘s a vision of the future that becomes more and more obvious to me by the day.
Alternatively, the bubble collapses and the video game industry needs to be rebuilt
Xbox is just a subscription rental business at this point, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in gaming outside of that.
Yup!
The problem is if nobody sells affordable hardware or hardware at all anymore, the only path they can go is cloud gaming. That means from here on onward ownership is dead.
Physical versions only have value of they are complete and relatively bug free, and originally purposed to avoid big downloads.
Nowadays day 1 patching may be the same size as the install or larger negating half the point. The other half is lost because almost everything is a subscription, multi-player, or delivered with too many bugs as a beta test.
Collecting physical copies is a thing, but is niche.
they need to make a new disc that can handle all that space
SD cards.
Further, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn’t. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.
If the disc version exists, can’t you buy it online?
And aren’t console discs de facto installer stubs?
Just curious, I play on PC where physical discs haven’t been a thing for a long time.
If the disc exists, yes, but I’m talking about going to a store on launch day and not being able to find the big new release.
Yes, I could see launch day availability being an issue.
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This is basically why I’m giving up collecting physical media. I have several hundred games on disc/cartridge, and consoles from most generations, but it’s really hard to find newer games on physical media these days. Most of the good ones can’t be found used, and good luck finding a new copy anywhere.
And of course all the older physical media is also getting harder to get because people are paying a lot for it now… like I have some games in the $80-500 range that I paid very little for years ago. I know the used sales probably don’t count to this article, but you can just look at them to see what’s going on with new physical sales. They made whole consoles that don’t have disc drives, so people couldn’t buy used and bypass them making profit, ffs. Of course the physical game market is crashing. They did that on purpose.
PS5 era is the last hurrah for physical media for me, and I honestly barely even play on PS5 because there’s just nothing to get. I’ve managed to get like a dozen discs for it, and that was difficult. Meanwhile I have easily 4x that for ps4, and prior generations are even better represented. I’d like to get the current Xbox since it’s mostly backward compatible with the one before it IIUC and I have a 360, but I just have no motivation to do so.
Go Trump! God I love winning.🙃
I just want to lick a couple more Switch cartridges fresh out the box. Is that too much to ask?
Uh… What?
They have a bitter taste on them so kids don’t swallow them.
Worth pointing out that Circana does not fully track Steam (only some, albeit large publishers). They don’t track GOG or Epic at all (they are of course a lot smaller than Steam).
Why would any of that affect physical software? Does steam and gog sell cartridges or discs that I’m unaware of?
I got confused by the following:
While Circana reports that content spending was up 1% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, that’s with subscription spending rising 16% and 2% growth in mobile.
That’s just saying overall revenue is up, but that includes digital sales like subscriptions and mobile storefront sales.
While physical sales are down, the digital sales make up for the loss to the point of actually being a 1% gain.
If it refers to the total games software market (digital sales, physical sales, micro-transactions, subscriptions and mobile), then I think I my point stands.
I wasn’t sure if “content spending” excludes say micro-transactions for software that is not available physically.
I mean Valve sells the Steam Deck(s)?
The steamdeck is physical software? I thought it was hardware with digital software.
Read it again:
Physical software and hardware sales
I say this as someone who loves their Steam Deck… Steam Deck sales are insignificant compared to consoles.
6 million in 3 years:
The Switch 2 has sold over 10 million, June to September. 3 months. There has been another 3 months since then.
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/nintendo-switch-2-sales-10-million-1236569355/
No one said it was significant.
Of course, there’s a significant difference between the two, as a Switch 2 is the only way to play Switch 2 games, while you can play Steam games on a multitude of devices, including other portable ones.
And more significantly, the Switch 2 is for kids. There’s no sizable youth market for the Steam Deck.
But out of all the handheld PCs, the Steam Deck is #1, so that should give you some idea about the sales on the others. 😉
This is about physical sales, not digital.
This will probably be a controversial take but physical media shouldn’t exist in 2025.
Ownership of games SHOULD exist and so should multiple competing store fronts. We need to normalise DRM free digital copies rather than ewaste blu-ray discs that’ll one day degrade and become useless.
There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.
I thought we were MAYBE heading that way in the days of iTunes but then the oh-so-convenient streaming came along and entirely killed the majority’s desire to actually own movies.
At least music is a medium that managed to transition to DRM-free digital storefronts, even if it is barely used.
It’s because musicians in general, are chill.
No legal one, at least.
GOG opportunity!
They tried. They can’t sell movies that the rights holders won’t allow them to, and the studios all kind of unanimously decided not to do this.
Oh, did they? I must’ve either missed it or blocked it out. Well, Hollywood digs its own grave at everybody’s expense and loss
I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can run the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 works too) on a 1440p monitor:
This is a 30 year old game!
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic digital media can’t exist because the data has to be stored on something physical eventually.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?
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In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.
… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.
Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.
… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.
I have mixed opinions on physical media but. I’m starting to agree with you on this point. In the past I’m all for having the option to buy it on disc/cartridge but when you have to install the game anyway and download a day one patch it kinda defeats the purpose of it. Also offline mode on consoles if just a joke at this point.
What if usb sticks lasted hundreds of years, were still the same price or cheaper, were faster to read and write, and you could buy games that shipped to you on them, that you could potentially also add patchers onto? Like they would always have the original version on them, but has enough space to periodically add updates on over the years, so that you could revisit them.
And they were made in a shape that wasn’t awkward. And had good label surfaces. Throw them in a drawer or display them in a stack somehow.
And you didn’t have to install the game on your pc, you could just run the drive as is.
This is something we could potentially have in the future, if companies stopped being such short sighted greedy bitches about everything.
A steady hand on the tiller of society? In this economy?
Shit take. Give me something I can hold.
That doesn’t feel too surprising. There’s nothing really new to buy in terms of hardware; likely everyone who wanted a specific console now has one. And others like myself are waiting: I want a Switch 2 OLED, but that’s not available yet.
And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck, with no real must-have titles for console to boost sales right now. And new physical titles are expensive.
It’s just a dip caused by a combination of factors. If GTA VI releases next november, the chart is going to look like a rocket taking off.
And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck
I don’t think I’ve ever had more great new game releases, personally.
Worst physical hardware and software sales since 1995 so far. Switch 2 won’t be its first holiday next year and potential price hikes from storage and ram next year
On a related note I had a hankering for playing the Etrian Oddysey games and went to look for it at the Nintendo Switch store.
Eighty fucking dollars for the trilogy remaster. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum I guess.
…what physical games and hardware?
It’s like all these overpriced new games have more people waiting for sales, I know I sure have
what happened in 1995?
The market was just way smaller back then. Video games weren’t a mainstream hobby yet.
PlayStation 1 had only just come to America a month or two prior, and the n64 wouldn’t exist for another year. Basically, it was just arcade games that were popular at that point, some snes games, and some ps1 games in Japan.
Imagine “gaming” being just donkey kong, street fighter, mario, and contra, and a ps1 cost $300 usd.
“Gaming” then was about as popular as virtual reality now.
First year recorded.
Not sure why anyone would buy games at this point.
There are so many games available for free, and any new ones kinda suck donkey balls. Couple that with a shitty economy, grocery prices are through the roof, and it’s no surprise people aren’t wasting money on video games as much.
Because the new ones are great. There has been no shortage of bangers for the last few years.
If you say so.
If games don’t come on physical media, what’s the point of a physical device?
What do you play the digital media on?
Anything. Xbox, PS, PC, whatever. But there’s no reason to be constrained to one device/platform anymore.
Those are all physical devices though. I agree platform exclusives aren’t good for anyone but the companies but it does seem like most are moving away from that model with these newer generation consoles.
And that’s worth talking about in relation to this article too. But also, you buy those devices at retail, and we’re down 27% from last year.
Meanwhile I bought an Xbox Series S and PS5 and a Switch 2 plus a bunch of SSDs all in November lol
Having a knee injury plus not much else to do plus a 75 inch TV I bought back in September will do that for you lol
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