Sony plans to stop producing discs for new PlayStation games in January 2028. Physical buyers may be a minority of the audience and revenue, but analyst Rhys Elliott argues their spending still makes them important to Sony.
Physical sales vary widely by game. In his analysis of PlayStation game sales, Alinea Analytics head of market analysis Elliott puts physical sales above 40% for Pragmata and Onimusha: The Way of the Sword. Resident Evil Requiem‘s PS5 physical release sold 1.3 million copies, accounting for 30.2% of the game’s PlayStation revenue and about 15% of its revenue overall. Those PS5 disc sales generated 1.8 times the revenue of all Requiem sales on Xbox, including physical and digital console sales and Xbox PC sales.
The comparison does not show whether people who bought the PS5 discs would have purchased the game digitally if physical copies were unavailable. It does show how much revenue the physical release brought in on its own.
Sports games showed a sharper divide. Physical discs accounted for less than 10% of PS5 sales for EA Sports FC 27, Madden 27, and MLB The Show 26. Elliott sees a difference in buying habits, with single-player audiences more inclined to buy discs and sports or live-service audiences leaning heavily toward digital.
A separate set of GSD figures put physical copies at 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine‘s launch sales overall, with the share reaching 51% in Europe. That offers a different snapshot from Elliott’s PS5 comparison.
Elliott describes physical buyers as longtime fans and collectors who often preorder, including collector’s editions, and stay engaged long after launch. Sony also has a financial incentive to favor digital sales, which avoid the physical disc production chain and take place through a marketplace the company controls more directly. Elliott argues that Sony’s communication about the change has added to consumer cynicism, even as he expects many unhappy buyers to keep purchasing through the PlayStation Store.
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