Video game companies still sell millions of physical copies of games every year, but that’s not where they make the bulk of their money. As Sony’s latest corporate report shows, physical game sales for PlayStation 5 and PS4 are practically a rounding error on a rounding error, and the number just keeps going down. The total percentage of revenue from physical software sales is now half of what it was before the PS5 launched.
Sony Interactive Entertainment made roughly $31.5 billion in its last fiscal year, which ended in March. That was up nearly 10 percent from the year prior as gaming works overtime within Sony to bolster the company’s financials. But within its games and services division, AKA PlayStation, only 3 percent of that revenue came from physical games. That’s still $945 million! Nothing to sniff at, for sure, but also a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the skyrocketing division.
It’s also the lowest share of PlayStation revenue that’s ever come from physical game sales. For the year prior to the PS5’s launch in 2020, Sony reported 6 percent of revenue came from discs. The next year it dropped to just 5 percent. That number stayed flat for a few more years before dropping to 4 percent in its 2024 corporate report and then 3 percent this past year, half of what it was at the end of the PS4 generation. One reason the number might have been so low last year? Even fewer first-party Sony games than usual, which hardcore fans traditionally buy more physical copies of.
While the percentage of overall sales that physical games make up for PlayStation continues to decline, the fact that the total revenue from those physical games isn’t falling as fast could be one reason Sony might be thinking of keeping a disc drive as an option for the PS6 but moving away from having it as the default. A recent report from Insider Gaming claimed the next-gen console will continue the detachable disc-drive trend where an all-digital machine is the default and players have to pay extra to utilize their physical media.
Each console maker is currently grappling with the transition away from physical games in their own way. Many first-party Xbox games don’t even ship with a physical version anymore, and Nintendo’s controversial game key cards for the Switch 2 mean that the majority of third-party games on the new handheld hybrid don’t truly have a physical version either. The PS5 console cycle could end up being the final nail in the coffin for physical game media.
