One of the biggest issues in the gaming community currently is the “disconnect” between what publishers/developers think gamers want and what gamers actually want. We’re not even talking about video games in general here, but the consoles they’re played on. Two of the “big three” have been heavily pushing the idea of only doing digital-only consoles. Microsoft has even been trying to make Cloud Gaming a thing so that they wouldn’t have to keep selling discs. Sony is of a like mind and has put out multiple digital-only versions of the PS5 to try and lure people to that line of thinking. Hint: it’s not working.
Don’t take our word for it, though. You can take a look at the data from Circana. They revealed that 82% of the PS5’s lifetime sales have been ones with physical disc drives attached to them. Currently, as of June 2024, the PlayStation 5 has sold over 60 million units. So, rounding down means that over 48 million units are physical disc units.
We can even take this notion one step further via the pre-orders for the PlayStation 5 Pro. When it was revealed, Sony noted that it would be a digital-only system and that if you wanted to play physical games on it, you needed to get a disc drive. So, people started buying up those disc drives in great numbers! That was part of the backlash with the Pro system, as you needed to spend a lot more money to play games if you wanted the perks that the standard disc-installed version already had.
So, what does this truly say about gaming overall? The simplest answer is that while digital gaming is a big deal, as proven by all three console makers, including Nintendo, who have seen numerous games sell multi-millions with just digital sales, physical games are still king. That might not seem the case, given that certain stores don’t hold as many if any, physical games on their shelves. However, when you think of things like Amazon, they constantly have sales of physical titles, to the point that sometimes they’re sold out just from pre-orders!
It’s understandable that console makers want to shift to digital services only to save money on certain production costs. However, if they force that change, they’ll end up with fewer sales, which will hurt their bottom dollar.
Speaking for Sony and Microsoft, given the 2024s they’ve had so far, they can’t afford that.
