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Sony’s decision to ditch discs was practically inevitable, data shows
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/07/the-playstation-game-disc-was-dying-long-before-sony-pulled-the-plug/ [arstechnica.com]
Many gamers have been lamenting Sony’s recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs [arstechnica.com] in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.
In a social media thread Thursday morning [bsky.app], Piscatella shared insights into Circana’s tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends [bsky.app] shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US.
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just 37 million physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.
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There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted [bsky.app] that aggregate spending on physical video games in the US was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US [bsky.app]
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Looking back, it’s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade [arstechnica.com], PSN [arstechnica.com] and WiiWare [arstechnica.com] were already showing console gamers’ willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.
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by the end of the 2010’s physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent [arstechnica.com]. In recent years, some big-budget games have been skipping a retail release altogether [arstechnica.com] or offering “download in a box” retail options like Switch 2’s Game Key Cards [arstechnica.com] or Grand Theft Auto VI‘s printed download codes [digitalfoundry.net].
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None of this data will be of much comfort to the small but passionate group of console gamers who still buy games they can hold in their hands. But the numbers pretty clearly explain why Sony doesn’t seem worried about losing what is, financially speaking, a rather small segment of its current gaming business.
