And that 3% revenue number is misleading because don't they factor all digital revenue into their total revenue before subtracting the publishers 70% cut? I could be wrong but I could've sworn I read that here somewhere.
AI search says this.
Sony reports full gross revenue for digital game sales in their financial reports, rather than just their net cut.
Under accounting standards (IFRS 15), Sony classifies itself as the principal for digital transactions, meaning it records the entire sale price of third-party games as revenue before paying the publisher's share. In contrast, for physical disc sales, Sony often records only its net royalty cut (typically 15–30%) as revenue, which makes digital revenue appear disproportionately larger than physical unit sales might suggest.
I don't know, when it comes to $70 games, reporting 100% of that revenue from digital sales vs only 15% from physical sales sounds like a gaslighting campaign to me.
There is nothing misleading on reporting their revenue. In case of PSN players pays them100% of the money paid for a game, so that is reported as revenue.
Then Sony pays the fee to transaction platforms, currency exchange, if there are refunds and chargebacks they pay them and after some time they give the devs their 70%+ cut. All these things count for Sony as costs paid time after the transaction, sometimes in a different quarter of when the player made the payment.
In case of physical is different, because in case of 3rd party publishers they (not the players) pay SIE Sony's royalty fee plus to a different Sony subsidiary the costs of making the discs & boxes once they order the discs before shipping them. So the publishers -or players- never pay Sony 100% of the price the players pay for agame, Sony doesn't see the part that goes to the store, distributor, publisher, shipment partners, etc. So Sony can only count as revenue a portion of that 3rd party physical they got.
This is Sony's specific wording, they don't mention net or gross but it's gross revenue:
In any case, over time since the PS3 the percentage of SIE revenue that came from selling physical games kept decreasing and the one from selling digital games, addons, subs and off-PS 1st party games kept increasing, to the point physical games generated 1.73% of SIE's revenue last quarter and 2.67% last full FY.
Following the trend, in a few years that will be 0% or almost. Then there are things like the Trump tariffs, or USA and Israel causing the blockage of Ormuz with their attacks to Iran, which causes the price increase and shortages of oil, which causes shortages and price increases of stuff made with oil, like the discs, the plastic boxes or the shipments of the physical games.
So the costs increase but the price of the games remain the same, which means that the profit margin for Sony and the publishers from the physical keep reducing, and some day may even dissapear if still there.
I have a friend who runs a small indie publisher that mostly publishes internally developed games and the first games from his students in a local university where he teaches, and around half a decade ago he told me that after everything his margin as publisher for physical disc games was barely 0.5€/copy. He kept releasing small physical batches of each game they release, but isn't because of the business.
Reverse everything and fire hulst on stage.
Hulst has nothing to do with players deciding more and more to spend their money mostly on digital, and particularly in addons than in buying physical games. Hulst is only in charge of making first party games.
Nishino is the one who is in charge of the PS platform, 3rd party relations, PS marketing and the PSN store, so he's who decides if Sony stops accepting new physical games for their console or not.
James Sawyer Ford
a bitch, like the bitch he is.
