The way that consumers buy video games is changing, with Sony recently announcing that it would cease the production of new PlayStation game discs in January 2028 in a bid to push consumers towards more profitable digital purchases.
It’s a big shift for the $500+ billion dollar video game industry, which once had a significant retail presence in the US, but one that has been predicted for some time.
“It will require many years and months for the majority of video game purchases to become digital. In short, in 20 years or so I might say it will have probably changed.”
A matter of time
Speaking in an investor Q&A session all the way back in 2009, then Nintendo president and Satoru Iwata correctly stated that it would take “20 years or so” for digital distribution to render physical copies in stores obsolete.
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He dismissed notions that it could happen sooner as “radical” and argued that it would take a significant number of years for consumer behaviour to change.
His belief has been proven correct by empirical data as Nintendo’s latest financial report revealed that the proportion of digital sales have just surpassed physical ones for the first time in the company’s 137 year history.
While it seems safe assume that Sony’s next console will not feature disc reader, and credible reports suggest Microsoft-owned competitor Xbox headed the same way, Nintendo is ironically the last major industry player that seems fully committed to physical releases — at least for the time being.
Part of a wider trend
Digital game sales are even more dominant on other platforms, hence the Sony decision to ditch physical formats entirely.
According to data from market research firm Ampere Analysis, when the PlayStation 4 originally launched in 2013 just 13% of games sold for Sony platforms were digital.
12 years later in 2025, and the share of digital game sales had steadily grown to almost 80%. Unless plans change, this will presumably be 100% come 2028 — almost exactly two decades since Iwata’s 20 year prediction.
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
