It’s a subscription machine now. You have to pay money for it to function, and 98% of games are unplayable without the subscription. They’re getting it to 100%. The idea that you could buy a machine, put a game in, play that game WITHOUT an internet connection and subscription, that’s dead.
I’m likely going to sell my PS5. I don’t want to support Sony at all. Hoping to get what I paid for it now that hardware prices are through the roof. It’ll be sad to part with the Atomic Purple Dark Plates, but my PS5 collects dust.
Hoping to get what I paid for it now that hardware prices are through the roof.
I’ve got a number of friends that have even made a profit off of their used systems. Not because it was their first choice to do so, but because that’s what the market rate is now.
I may just have to part with it then. I’m guessing it’ll sell fast ahead of GTA6. It’s weird but it is probably my least favorite console I’ve ever owned. The only meaningful exclusive I’ve played was Astro Bot. As a huge platformer kid, that brought me back to my PS1 days.
As gaming software sales have dropped significantly over the lifespans of the PS4/PS5 vs the overall sales of the PS3, it becomes apparent that digital game sales are winning in this day and age.
In 2019 the physical software sales for PlayStation were 6% of their revenue. That number has decreased year over year and what they are trying to do is make up the difference by shunting people to subscription services like PS+. We knew this already. This data has been spread out over several articles especially over the last 2 days.
Thanks for sharing the link, it’s good to see some more recent data. The 3% is tough to swallow as someone who likes to buy games day 1 and sell them later. From their perspective, it’s understandable they want to kill this, and focus on the higher margin digital segment. Still, I’m not going to applaud a giant corporation when they do something that benefits them but not the customers.
I almost always buy physical first party games, regardless of platform. Having Zelda, God of War, Forza etc. on the shelf is just part of the identity and DNA of the system. I love each platform not because of the hardware, but the games behind the company. If it’s multiplatform/multiplayer focused, I tend to go digital/PC. Give me physical if your going to be a walled garden ecosystem for your platform!
Exactly! And maintaining the plant to make physical discs costs money. Sony can reduce costs by forcing everyone to digital copies. Customers will ultimately go along with it, because they understand their personal preferences are not worth as much as an extra $0.50 per game in profit.
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders?
Sony lost a shit ton of money with their live service games projects. Sony execs probably told the PlayStation division to find a way to reduce cost and control the damage or heads will roll.
Some beancounter at Sony realized that they could increase margins by a tiny amount if they removed physical disks. I bet they haven’t factored in the reputation loss from doing so and in the end it will come out that the margin gain will be overshadowed by the loss of sales.
I just think this’ll be a massive boon for Nintendo, if they can resist shitty decisions themselves. The Switch 2 was a bust –
My reasoning
7.9" LCD, 279ppi 1080p when the standard is OLED, 500+ppi and 1440p+, and the size, while improving, is too close to a smartphone. Paired with a basic size battery and it has a disappointing battery life.
– but Nintendo have the potential to be a hero in the next few years. As for Xbox, they have never been popular enough to overtake Sony, as well as also making shit decisions.
On the retro consoles that I play, I can fit the entire library onto an SD card and put it in a flash cart or ODE. And yet I still buy physical games and put them on my shelf.
People want to have a physical game collection. It’s tactile and it helps with choosing what to play when you can see all the boxes. It also feels more permanent, and for a lot of media types, it is more permanent than the NAND flash in SD cards.
This data is of course a few years old, trends have probably shifted more towards digital during Covid. But Playstation is still quoting misleading digital sales %, as a lot of small titles and DLCs are only sold digitally, skewing the numbers.
Physical discs disappearing will hurt all players, even digital-only buyers, as Sony will have no competition from the physical market, and can set prices as high as they think they can get away with.
I do have a strong suspicion that the end of the road of this type of move is going to end with an anti-trust case. Like, I don’t see any way to avoid that.
You can’t have a platform dictate everything about how it sells merchant wise without having an antitrust involved.
It may not be the US doing it, but I do think that some country is going to antitrust them.
My big problem besides the price monopoly is the lack of true ownership for digital media. It’s just expensive licensing that can be taken away or altered at any moment. If Sony gets his way, we are looking at a very dark future for gaming
From Mat PIscatella of Circana (tracking US sales data, Piscatella specializes in video games) on Bluesky:
Through May 2026, over 25% of PS5 hardware units sold in the US life-to-date are digital systems.
The life-to-date US attach rate of the add-on Disc Drive to those digital systems is over 5%.
Old data points keep getting thrown around, unfortunately.
Is what it is. Both the pro disc and pro digital camps on this are using whatever numbers best fit the arguments, as one would expect.
Can you take the financial reporting 85%ish digital split as the true split for games with both physical and digital editions? No.
But are the splits better reflected from 5 year old numbers obtained from a leak? Also, no.
Anyways, the numbers aren’t even the point at the moment, are they.
The only time I wanted a digital copy of a ps5 game was when I had a ps5 at home and one at work and got tried of forgetting a disc at one place or another.
