The slight uptick in physical game revenues last year can\u2019t make up for 16 years of consistent, sharp declines.<\/p>\n The slight uptick in physical game revenues last year can\u2019t make up for 16 years of consistent, sharp declines.<\/p>\n Credit:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Mat Piscatella \/ Circana<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n By the time the PlayStation Vita launched in 2012<\/a>, Sony required that all publishers that make physical game cartridges also offer a downloadable option. Subsequent consoles like the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One continued that trend, and by the end of the 2010\u2019s physical-exclusive console releases were practically nonexistent<\/a>. In recent years, some big-budget games have been skipping a retail release altogether<\/a> or offering \u201cdownload in a box\u201d retail options like Switch 2\u2019s Game Key Cards<\/a> or Grand Theft Auto VI\u2018s printed download codes<\/a>.<\/p>\n Over the last 15 years or so, console gamers have overwhelmingly voted with their wallets in favor of all these digital download options, preferring the convenience of not leaving the house to purchase a game (or leaving the couch to switch to a new title) over the permanence of games on discs and cartridges. The shift has been so strong that many of today\u2019s console gamers are fine skipping the disc drive entirely; Piscatella shared today<\/a> that 27 percent of all PS5 hardware and 52 percent of all Xbox Series hardware sold in the US so far has been \u201cDigital Only\u201d editions.<\/p>\n None of this data will be of much comfort to the small but passionate group of console gamers who still buy games they can hold in their hands. But the numbers pretty clearly explain why Sony doesn\u2019t seem worried about losing what is, financially speaking, a rather small segment of its current gaming business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The beginning of the end Looking back, it\u2019s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":564580,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-564579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=564579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/564579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=564579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=564579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=564579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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