Circana / Piscatella: US Physical Software Spending Dropped Under 5% of Total Spending in 2023.
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
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you only forget that in FY2021 a global pandemic happened and people were avoiding leaving home and buying stuff in store so obviously the % would be way bigger, in the country i live, physical represents 65 - 80% of sales on PlayStation, so much so, that last month, Sony opened a new physical game factory in the state of Amazon, Brazil (country that i live), physical is FAR from dead, very far, the relationship people have to videogames is completely different than music and movies, i see a lot of people mentioning the ratio in these charts but no one actually answers the questions that matter, how many of these digital games were full priced copies? where most companies make the most amount of money? that's the data we should have, how many copies did God Of War Ragnarok sold digitally vs physically? how many copies Spiderman 2 sold digitally vs physically? we all know digital is bigger due to sales every week on PSN and games costing as low as 5 - 10 dollars, i can guarantee most physical copies sold are full priced copies.
it almost looks like they want people to believe and feel like the physical format is dead and have no salvation, so they stop consuming it early to increase the digital ratio. including mobile (a market that has billions of users) and PC that is 100% digital makes absolutely no sense, the data should be physical vs digital across the 3 consoles we have in the market, that would actually make sense.
literally... mobile has billions of users it would make any percentage go as low as 5%
For accuracy it should be divided.
There should be part where games Physically released and digital.
Ratallaika and other indie crap can occupy Only Digital.
How you can make an argument that physical sells less when you don't have physical in the first place? It makes no sense.
I don't think they need to be paid directly, they see the writing on the wall and they desparately want Microsoft to remain as a market participant because their data is more valuable the more competitors there are in the market.
I'd go even further and remove indies that would never have had a physical release.
But your scenario is still much fairer and makes much more sense than how they did it.
They never had any, I bet these guys sell themselves for almoust nothing.
I know people that shill for Xbox here in Brazil simple because they are close to Xbox representatives or know someone that works there.
True, digital grew more than usual this year. It also grew in the 2008 crysis. I remember that in case of mobile we had a big jump that yeaar too.
Yes, I think far from death. It's still a big part even if over years its percentage gets smaller in the worldwide scale.
We don't know the percent of digital or physical sales that are full priced ones. But these percentages were revenue, not units.
We only know it for some of them, some of the ones who are public companies. I shared the Sony ones, who are the kings in console. And since a huge part of the money that money they make are from 3rd parties, and their console is the one where most 3rd parties sell more, it's the most similar thing we have regarding real numbers.
We also have some estimations from market research firms, which were somewhat simlar to the Sony ones (over 60-70% digital).
Well, at least here it's pretty common to see discounted or price cutted physical games, quite often beyond the digital one, specially during the first months of the game. I assume due to competition with other stores or to clear stock from time to time. But I'd say that in general digital games are more discounted, yes.
When companies or market research firms or publishers talk about the gaming industry they talk about the whole gaming industry, not only the type of games you personally like. So yes, they also include PC, mobile, VR and so on. Unless they are talking particularly about consoles.
And when looking at the money these games make, same goes with revenue sources: they normally also report all their revenue sources, which also include addons (even if most of them are from GaaS/F2P, even if you don't like them) or subs because they also are revenue sources for the games. Unless they are specifically talking about game sales/units sold.
They simply report the numbers they have, which are what they are. And are in line with the trend the market had in the last decade or so and match with going back to normality after the pandemic. It depends on what they are reporting/looking at in each case.
In this case, Piscatella was talking about how the percentage of revenue coming from physical vs the total game revenue in all gaming platforms changed in the last 5 years. We know every year physical got smaller in PS and Swich (the main platforms where most physical games are sold). We know that in these years mobile grew more than PC and console, we know in console digital sales grew vs physical, we know game subs grew more than game sales, we know in consoles addons revenue grew more than game sales. At least worldwide.
So seeing NPD/Circana numbers indicating that they represent a 5% less of the total gaming revenue (for USA) than 5 years ago isn't a surprise.
Why Matt lost his integrity? For reporting industry numbers you don't like?
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This is for the whole Sony, not SIE. But as I explained yes, both physical and digital, both 1st and 3rd game sales have related costs, the ones I explained and probably more I forgot.
In this case graph, for SIE it's including the manufacturing costs of hardware and accesories (millons of units being sold at a loss) plus R&D on next gen stuff and the costs of making their AAA games (over two dozen games with a budget in most cases of over $200-300M), of signing 2nd and 3rd party deals, of paying companies for including games on PS Plus, etc.
What appears in that is what I explained before: in case of physical, 3rd parties sell the games themselves to retailers and pay Sony their revenue cut (shown there as "royalties from third parties"). So in case of physica, the only money that SIE gets from 3rd party sales (so the only thing posted there) is the royalty.
At least in Spain there's another Sony subsidiary (which I understand isn't under SIE since as I remember they also print movies and music cds) who is the one who manufactures the physical copies. So when a third party -as in the case of some friends of mine who make indie physical limited editions- order retail copies they buy them to that other subsidiary. So the revenue for the manufacturing should be somewhere else in other division.
Regarding digital, it's what I said: there's an agreement where Sony sells the game and and in case of 3rd party gets a cut (what is reporetd there). The cut of the publisher is sent to the publisher, but with some delay due to paperwork, potential refunds/chargebacks/etc.
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OP
OP
Well I mean, most releases don't even get physical copies as those are idies and there are thousands of them. Matt knows this, he's just shilling for Microsoft as usual. All AAA still get physical release on console accept Microsoft published games.
This dude is doing damage control since ms announcement they're going third-party lol 
He wants the console business to die so badly
He wants the console business to die so badly