Beer-Aid

Just wanted to make this post as there are some cherry-picked Circana stats out there for North America. 70 million physical PlayStation 5 games were sold in FY2025, 22% of all PlayStation game sales. Many PS5 games are not released physically (i.e. indies, or games like Mixtape, Dispatch, and ARC Raiders), or have limited print runs (i.e. Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem were famously difficult to get a hold of physically). It can also be more difficult to get hold of new copies of older games. Steam have said that only 15% of total player time and revenue there are from games less than 12 months old; this too would have an impact on physical sales, as it would push many towards a digital copy where a physical one isn't available. To get an idea of what 70 million physical game sales looked like compared to other consoles (i.e. to try and strip out the effect of counting the purchase of a $5 indie and $70 AAA game equally) I did a comparison versus PS1 to PS4 physical game sales for their sixth years on the market (to try and account for the bell curve of game sales). That calculation of 70 million physical games comes to 34.5% (PS1), 31.11% (mainly PS2), 42.56% (mainly PS3) and 42% (PS4) of what was sold is terms of physical games for FY99, FY05, FY11 and FY18 respectively. Some recent games, such as Astro Bot, sold better physically than digitally (at least in Europe). The physical vs digital game split very much depends on game type; single player games do far better in terms of physical sales. We didn't have that many big single-player story based PS5 games so far this year. All of this would factor into PS5 physical game sales.