US physical game sales hit their lowest monthly total on record in July, falling to just $85 million in revenue, the weakest figure Circana (formerly NPD) has recorded since it began tracking the market in 1995. The numbers offer some of the clearest data yet supporting Sony‘s controversial decision to stop manufacturing new physical PlayStation discs starting January 2028.
According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, physical software spending in July was down sharply against an already-declining trend. Last month, only two PlayStation games sold more than 10,000 physical copies during the week ending July 11, while seven had sold over 100,000 physical units in the US year- to-date.
Hardware wasn’t spared either: US console spending fell 29% year-over-year to $282 million in revenue, the weakest July total since 2020, while unit sales cratered by 39% compared to July 2025. That decline comes even as the average price of a new console has climbed 16% year-over-year to $542, underscoring that consumers are buying far fewer machines, arguably due to rising prices.
Of the remaining physical spending, the market is heavily skewed toward Nintendo. Its platforms accounted for 63% of all physical game spending in the tracked period, with Sony’s PlayStation trailing at 32%. Microsoft’s Xbox, meanwhile, has become almost a rounding error on physical shelves: the platform has accounted for just 4% of US physical game sales so far this year.
This single month fits into a much longer trend. US physical game spending for all of 2025 totaled just $1.5 billion, itself an all-time low, down 11% from 2024. That’s a steep fall from the format’s 2008 peak of $11.6 billion, meaning physical software spending has collapsed by roughly 87% over the past 17 years, even before adjusting for inflation.
Numbers like these inevitably go a long way toward explaining Sony’s rationale for winding down disc production. With physical software now representing such a small and constantly shrinking share of overall spending, even for a platform holder like PlayStation, where physical still commands a bigger piece of the pie than on Xbox, maintaining a dedicated manufacturing and distribution pipeline for a format generating $85 million in an entire month, spread across every publisher and platform combined, becomes increasingly difficult to justify financially, despite consumer and developer complaints.
It remains to be seen whether Xbox keeps discs (as per a recent Digital Foundry rumor) in an attempt to win some points back with disgruntled hardcore gamers.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief.
In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech’s gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews.
Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications.
His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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