Many gamers have been lamenting Sony’s recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.
In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana’s tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.
The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn’t all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the US so far this year.
Physical game sales in the US have fallen dramatically since their heyday in the late ’00s.
Mat Piscatella / Circana
Physical game sales in the US have fallen dramatically since their heyday in the late ’00s.Mat Piscatella / Circana
Only a small handful of PlayStation games sell significant physical numbers these days.
Mat Piscatella / Circana
Only a small handful of PlayStation games sell significant physical numbers these days.Mat Piscatella / Circana
Physical game sales in the US have fallen dramatically since their heyday in the late ’00s.Mat Piscatella / Circana
Only a small handful of PlayStation games sell significant physical numbers these days.Mat Piscatella / Circana
There are some small signs of hope for the physical game market, if you squint. Piscatella noted that aggregate spending on physical video games in the US was actually up 4 percent year-to-date, compared to the year before. But that small increase is a mere blip following 16 straight years of sizable declines in physical game spending in the US, reducing a peak of $11.5 billion in physical spending in 2009 to a mere $1.6 billion for the 12 months ending in May. And Piscatella attributed the recent growth in physical spending to “the Switch 2 and physical sales growth on Nintendo platforms,” while other platforms (such as PlayStation) were still seeing “percentage drops from the teens to the mid 30s” in that spending.
The beginning of the end
Looking back, it’s easy to see why sales of physical games seemed to peak in the late 2000s. At that time, services like Xbox Live Arcade, PSN and WiiWare were already showing console gamers’ willingness to pay for downloads of smaller indie games, and the concept was expanding to downloadable versions of major releases like Infamous and LittleBigPlanet.
The slight uptick in physical game revenues last year can’t make up for 16 years of consistent, sharp declines.Credit:
Mat Piscatella / Circana
Credit:
Mat Piscatella / Circana
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’s console gamers are fine skipping the disc drive entirely; Piscatella shared today that 27 percent of all PS5 hardware and 52 percent of all Xbox Series hardware sold in the US so far has been “Digital Only” editions.
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’t seem worried about losing what is, financially speaking, a rather small segment of its current gaming business.
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
