It is clear that digital games have become extremely lucrative for most video game companies with many seeing much higher digital game sales than physical game sales these days. In Nintendo’s case digital sales now account for roughly 50% of their sales, to be more specific digital sales accounted for 46% of all all software sold so far in in the current fiscal year. Here in the UK it was recently reported that digital sales account for nearly 90% of all video game sales in the biggest gaming market in Europe. There will always be a case for physical games for numerous reasons, but digital sales continue to climb. Nintendo also recently announced that Nintendo Switch Game Vouchers are back in North America for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, which will further push digital purchases.
Remember, this 46% includes DLC, microtransactions, and NSO subscriptions.
Since Nintendo actually bothered to separate digital only sales, we can get an actual percentage difference of games that are sold both physically and digitally. Total sales: 674. Remove digital only: 542. Digital versions of physical games:177.6. 177.6 is 32% of 542.
Unless I’m missing something, this means that when a game has a physical version, it will sell on average 68% physical and 32% digital.
Thinking more about this, it’s probably not a complete 1 to 1 comparison between “sales in yen” and “number of units sold”. Making this comparison won’t account for when a digital game goes on sale, and I’m not sure how physical sales works behind the scenes, since they probably sell it to stores for cheaper than what the stores sell to customers. All we can really is say is that when a game has a physical version, its “sales in yen” is 68% physical and 32% digital.