85% of PlayStation game sales are digital.
Apparently.
That figure is being widely quoted as a simple one-liner rationale for the end of PlayStation disc production. It would be easy to accept it uncritically as just common sense, a fait accompli. Why support physical if gamers don't want it?
...but is that what it means?
The figure came from a Sony financial report, where for one single quarter, specifically FY25Q4, the ratio of digital to physical full game sales was 85%. It was a new high. The average over the two year period in that report is 77%, but what the figure really represents is worth considering.
You could be forgiven for misinterpreting the 85% as meaning for every 100 copies of GoW Ragnarok, AstroBot or GT7 sold that quarter only 15 were purchased on disc. Or you might assume it meant Sony made 85% of their software sales revenue from digital games. None of that is true.
The truth is that the vast majority of PS5 games are digital only. Less than 2000 PS5 games have been pressed on disc. How many PS5 games are for sale (not F2P) on the PSN Store? About 7,500.
That's where this percentage figure is misleading. It counts every sale as equal. If you bought Death Stranding 2 on disc and somebody else bought Anime Fantasy Uni 3 for $0.99, the percentage figure considers these as wholly equivalent.
To put it another way, let's say I spend $100 on games this month. I buy one physical AAA game for $69.99 and spend the rest on six little $5 digital only games. What percentage of my game purchases were digital? More than 85%.
The 85% figure does not truly represent 'consumer preference' and cannot in good faith be used to justify the end of PlayStation physical game distribution.
Don't be fooled. The push to a digital only market has nothing to do with what gamers want. It's only about maximizing profit through market control.
The percentage isn't misleading, if you don't read it properly, don't understand or don't want to understand it is your issue, not theirs.
They say it clearly, out of the full game UNITS (not revenue) sold (so not free dowloads like F2P, full game trials, demo or PS+ games) in Q4 for PS4/PS5 85% are digital and 15% are physical. It clearly shows that the player preference when buying full games on PS kept moving from physical to digital to the point that physical was only 15% that quarter.
It obviously counts all the PS games that can be / are bought. Obviously doesn't skip those that you don't personally like.
They also report separatedly the revenue they make with (1st+3rd party combined) selling games for PS physically, or digitally, or the revenue they get from addons (MTX+DLC+passes+digital deluxe upgrades), or with subs. So you can also see that only around 1.7% of the total revenue made by SIE this Q4 (also including hardware, accesories, subs, addons etc) was from physical games.
oh, I'm sure 4 years later that completely turned in the other direction... which is also why the disc drive was sold out everywhere when the Pro released.
That data was from FY21Q4 and included data from older years, where the percentage of physical sales was higher.
In any case, that FY21Q4 29% of the PS game units sold were physical. Now 4 years later, this FY25Q4 15% of the game units sold were physical. That decline isn't something new or recent, in case of PS and Xbox it started in the PS3 generation (in PC it started before).
Even in that leaked doc shows the decline, it shows a recap of the first party releases in FY21, FY20 and before FY20 and shows that the percentage that came from physical in both units and revenue was:
games released before FY20 > games released in FY20 > games released in FY21
In FY22 they acquired Bungie, and later they had the record release of Helldivers 2 and released many games more in PC. So make sure that for first party their percentage of units and revenue from physical kept declining since then.
