Other Physical Game Sales Are Down

[Demon_Skeith]

Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social)

The rate of decline in US physical video game software spending accelerated in 2024. Spending on physical video game software in the US has been cut in more than half since 2021 and is now more than 85% below its 2008 peak. We'll see if Switch 2 can help slow/reverse this trend in 2025.

bsky.app

The apparent decline of physical video game disk sales has only continued throughout 2024, as reported by Circana Executive Director and gaming industry analyst Mat Piscatella. He recently shared a graph highlighting the past 25 years of video game software sales in the United States on Bluesky (via VGC), revealing that while overall video game content spending (including subscriptions and microtransactions) has increased since 2019, sales of physical media have been on a steady decline over the past 16 years. Spending on video game disks has been cut in half since 2021, and is currently over 85% below the peak in 2008.

 

[froggyboy604]

I feel more people are trading physical games for other games and things, and buying and reselling used games are some of the reasons that physical games sales are lower.

 

[Demon_Skeith]

When Trump's tariffs hit it will further affect sales

 

[Artisan Vistra]

If this means anything like Pokemon Emerald, Platinum, and BW2, resellers are going to have a heyday.

 

[froggyboy604]

I think there are some physical games like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts physical games which have more re-play value which may cause more people to buy fewer physical games if they are satisfied replaying certain physicals games a few times before buying new physical games.

People replaying their old physical games may cause fewer people to buy as many physical gamed per year.

 

[Grungie]

People like digital out of pure convenience. You don’t have to go to the store or wait for it to come in the mail.

Then there’s the fact that even with physical games, you still have to install/download things to play the game. So it’s basically like older PC games where the disc just exists for copy protection. I do remember during the PS3/360 era, you saved storage space by buying physical, and use the storage for digital only games or update patches. Now there’s barely a difference between the two