Worth pointing out that Circana does not fully track Steam (only some, albeit large publishers). They don’t track GOG or Epic at all (they are of course a lot smaller than Steam).
While Circana reports that content spending was up 1% year-over-year to $4.8 billion, that’s with subscription spending rising 16% and 2% growth in mobile.
If it refers to the total games software market (digital sales, physical sales, micro-transactions, subscriptions and mobile), then I think I my point stands.
I wasn’t sure if “content spending” excludes say micro-transactions for software that is not available physically.
Worst physical hardware and software sales since 1995 so far. Switch 2 won’t be its first holiday next year and potential price hikes from storage and ram next year
For physical software, it’s super hard to buy it if stores aren’t stocking it.
The Xbox section doesn’t really exist at Target, Walmart, or Costco anymore, and it’s on the way out at Best Buy. Naturally that’s going to have an impact on sales.
Further, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn’t. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.
On the hardware side, I already have this generations worth of hardware (PS5, XSX, Steam Deck), and I’m not interested in all the baggage on the Switch 2.
Plus, hardware prices are up.
So the surprise would be if sales hadn’t gone down.
and of course, this will be misconstrued. The executives will shout “look! people don’t want physical ownership!” and the push to digital rentals will continue… and result in even higher prices when they pull a Netflix.
This is misplacing cause and effect. The shift to digital has been happening for years now. They cut physical production because fewer people were buying it.
This is basically why I’m giving up collecting physical media. I have several hundred games on disc/cartridge, and consoles from most generations, but it’s really hard to find newer games on physical media these days. Most of the good ones can’t be found used, and good luck finding a new copy anywhere.
And of course all the older physical media is also getting harder to get because people are paying a lot for it now.. like I have some games in the $80-500 range that I paid very little for years ago. I know the used sales probably don’t count to this article, but you can just look at them to see what’s going on with new physical sales. They made whole consoles that don’t have disc drives, so people couldn’t buy used and bypass them making profit, ffs. Of course the physical game market is crashing. They did that on purpose.
PS5 era is the last hurrah for physical media for me, and I honestly barely even play on PS5 because there’s just nothing to get. I’ve managed to get like a dozen discs for it, and that was difficult. Meanwhile I have easily 4x that for ps4, and prior generations are even better represented. I’d like to get the current Xbox since it’s mostly backward compatible with the one before it IIUC and I have a 360, but I just have no motivation to do so.
Further, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn’t. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.
If the disc version exists, can’t you buy it online?
And aren’t console discs de facto installer stubs?
Just curious, I play on PC where physical discs haven’t been a thing for a long time.
Physical versions only have value of they are complete and relatively bug free, and originally purposed to avoid big downloads.
Nowadays day 1 patching may be the same size as the install or larger negating half the point. The other half is lost because almost everything is a subscription, multi-player, or delivered with too many bugs as a beta test.
Collecting physical copies is a thing, but is niche.
This will probably be a controversial take but physical media shouldn’t exist in 2025.
Ownership of games SHOULD exist and so should multiple competing store fronts. We need to normalise DRM free digital copies rather than ewaste blu-ray discs that’ll one day degrade and become useless.
Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn't necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.
Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can't nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let's say we own the hard drive, that's great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It's unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.
I guess it’s not so much the discs I’m against (apart from the fact they do deteriorate faster than other types of storage) but the fact that there’s no option to retrieve and backup the data on said discs. Although saying that, most games require huge downloads to install anyway so is there even any benefit or security in ownership of physical media if it’s still useless without a significant download from a server than could theoretically cease to exist at any moment?
I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?
It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can run the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 works too) on a 1440p monitor:
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.
I thought we were MAYBE heading that way in the days of iTunes but then the oh-so-convenient streaming came along and entirely killed the majority’s desire to actually own movies.
At least music is a medium that managed to transition to DRM-free digital storefronts, even if it is barely used.
I have mixed opinions on physical media but. I’m starting to agree with you on this point. In the past I’m all for having the option to buy it on disc/cartridge but when you have to install the game anyway and download a day one patch it kinda defeats the purpose of it. Also offline mode on consoles if just a joke at this point.
In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.
… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.
Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.
… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.
We’re in the middle of the latest episode end-game-capitalism. Of course things are gonna be bad but nobody will blame the wealthy people because their job has become dependent of those same people.
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