Despite Sony’s decision to move away from physical media altogether, players continue to buy discs en masse. And what’s even more interesting is that it’s Sony’s own first-party games selling like hotcakes, given the overall proclivity of gamers to purchase disc versions of singleplayer games in particular.
That is according to The Game Business, which cites Ampere Analysis’ latest report on video game sales which approximates how many of those shipped copies went out as boxed editions. And, to no one’s surprise, Sony’s latest first-party singleplayer title has sold over two million copies, 35 percent of which were physical. There is a strong pattern of singleplayer games on Ampere’s charts all having physical above 30 percent of total sales, including Onimusha: Way of the Sword, The Blood of Dawnwalker, and Silent Hill: Townfall.
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Konami’s latest game had physical copies account for over 45 percent of its total sales, indicating that players will, indeed, go out and purchase boxed copies when single-player is in question. This, of course, still heavily skews raw data in digital’s favor, not only because the majority of sales are digital even for these singleplayer titles, but also because annual live-service games like EA Sports FC and NBA2K have single-digit physical sales.
Since these gargantuan titles tend to sell absurd copies each year, you can pretty much guess why Sony seems so keen on claiming that physical is a thing of the past. In fact, it’s just not an apples-to-apples comparison, but one that’s being misused on purpose to strike out one entire form of media.
And that wouldn’t be an issue if it were just Sony we were talking about. The company owns a major stake in Blu-ray and is one of the main parties involved in the technology, meaning that if it shuts down its factories and pulls support, others will be prevented from using it, too. Or at least handicapped to a significant degree.
