In three years, retail sales of games (discs, cartridges) have halved, which does not seem like a good trend.
Data from Circana (formerly NPD Group), a market research firm, paints a picture of a digital future. In the U.S., the amount of money spent in stores will decline by more than fifty percent by 2021. Consumption patterns have shifted to digital spending over the past decade and a half. Increasing internet speeds (if you can download a game quickly, you don’t need to go to the store to buy it on disc, although reselling a used disc would bring back some money), online marketplaces on consoles (PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, Nintendo eShop), and live service titles funded by microtransactions have played a big role.
According to Mat Piscatella, managing director of Circana, the pace of the shift to digital games has been accelerated by the pandemic. If you look at the last 25 years of spending data, the peak in retail sales was in 2008. Compared to that, the latest figures are down more than 85%. This doesn’t mean that the amount of spending has dropped that much, in fact, the amount spent on content (including digital sales, subscriptions, and microtransactions) has been on a steady upward trend since 2019.
Part of the 2024 results of the switch to digital games is that last year’s Nintendo Switch lineup was not very strong, and fans tend to buy the Japanese company’s games mostly in retail versions. The extent of digital conversion varies by platform and franchise. In Europe last year, digital went from 60% to 68%, but Xbox increased from 70% to 75%, PlayStation 5 jumped from 55% to 64%, and Nintendo held steady at 22%. Astro Bot was mostly bought on disc in Europe, but Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 sales were mostly digital. Only 6 titles were in the European top 20 in 2024, compared to 10 in 2023. New game sales dropped 21% from 2023 to 2024.
So it’s no coincidence that the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S are hitting stores without a Blu-ray drive…
Source: VGC
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