With news yesterday that PlayStation will no longer be offering physical games from January 2028 and Xbox presumably doing the same with their next console, Project Helix, which is scheduled for late next year, many have been wondering what Nintendo will do. VGC caught up with Circana senior director and video game industry advisor Mat Piscatella who said that it was inevitable that Sony and presumably Microsoft will abandon physical games as “sales of new physical video games have fallen every year since the late 2000s.”
When it comes to Nintendo, Mat Piscatella said it all remains up in the air, but the firm has held a “very strong share” of physical software with the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 and that retail has “leaned into Nintendo support more and more” meaning he doesn’t expect physical Nintendo games to go anywhere soon. Here’s what he said:
“Sales of new physical video games have fallen every year since the late 2000s. You may have seen the chart I posted over on Bluesky that has the US data for 12 months ending May. The US physical market has recently seen the slightest growth because of Nintendo Switch 2, but that won’t last.
“My gut says Nintendo does what Nintendo wants to do, and I don’t see them changing anything in their plans based on what Sony or Microsoft do on anything, really,” he explained. “Nintendo is going to be Nintendo, for better and/or worse.
“Retail has already leaned into Nintendo support more and more over the past few years (Nintendo also holds very strong share of physical software and hardware sales since the launch of Switch 2 in particular), so this could continue to increase, sure.
I feel like everyone expected this. Nintendo is still the only console manufacturer that hasn’t made a digital only console yet.
They better not go to that route.l because Nintendo didn’t do digital console for their games yet.
THEY BETTER NOT
They will do it sooner or later.
The physical medium is expensive to produce and games sold on this media are much more expensive than those in digital (which is an advantage for us, consumers)
The storage of games is increasingly important and no physical (cheap) media can contain them.
It also allows Nintendo to both fight against opportunity (bad for us) and recover the margins of publishers.
I prefer that to a gamepass or Netflix system personally.
wrong
Translation: I want companies to crap/pee on me and I’ll say it’s raining lovely rainbows.
The current situation with RAM/SSD pricing is just that, a current situation. It will lower at some point.
The reason Sony and MS is removing physical games is because they want to screw over customers even more than they do now with excessive digital pricing, and save money on not making discs you can’t resell later.
Why do you want to pay a sub fee plus purchase fee for something that can be taken away at any time? This has happened a bunch of times where movie streaming services take away movies. Sure, with digital it’s more convenient, but why pay them to potentially get screwed over? And even then the movie quality isn’t as good as owning a 1080p Blu-ray or 4k disc.
You know, I feel like even talking about the price of physical media at all is already kinda missing the point of why companies are really trying to move away from it (and to be clear, I don’t think this is an accident – I think they are consciously trying to steer the conversation that way to make the decision seem more warranted than it really is).
Here’s the thing. If the issue really was about the cost of physical media, Nintendo have already demonstrated the perfect solution to it: Just raise the price of physical releases. With the Switch 2 generation, Nintendo have started selling their physical games for 10€ more than their digital counterparts, which offsets some of the expense of cartridges. This is really what all the console manufacturers could and should do (and mind you, the other ones have even less of an excuse here, since discs are much cheaper to produce than cartridges – also, since their percentage of physical media is already much lower than Nintendo’s, there is even less loss of profit for them involved in the first place).
No, I don’t think the decision to move away from physical media was ever about the manufacturing costs, nor about direct profit margins. It’s about control. All the big publishers (including Nintendo, who have also been pushing this with game key cards) want to stay in control on how customers are using their games. What they want is a landscape in which they can make players lose access to all of their purchases at any time. The main idea there is that game development has become really expensive, and legacy games are becoming more and more of a valueable asset for copyright holders, so what they want is a world in which they can sell the same games to you again and again with minimal cost and effort. Any platform marketplace is eventually gonna close down, and even in cases where that does not outright remove the respective game from your system, you’ll still probably lose access to it at some point. The only choice then is to re-buy it on a newer marketplace, at least in a world where physical media and piracy do not exist.
Heck, I think it’s no coincidence at all that Sony announced the closing of the PS3 and Vita shops right alongside the end of physical media. Gotta take that PS3 version of The Last of Us away from you so that you have to buy the remake on PS5 instead!
I’m personally fine with their model of “you get a slight discount for buying digital” I’ll happily cough up the extra $10 to have physical copies of my games
If that’s the case then based however we will see if they change their mind or stick to physicals.
I don’t want physical to go away, but I buy digital. I don’t want decades and decades of physical media filling my home. I stumbled upon Super Mario 3D All Stars at a 2nd hand store this week. It will be my only physical Switch/Switch 2 game and will permanently stay in the Switch 2.
No not Nintendo. This can’t be happening.
My goat Nintendo stays winning go for it girlboss slay
Yeah meanwhile MBG and the ponies spread lies on Nintendo claiming they’re not physical and went all digital. People need to call these whinny adult children out still console warrioring at 40.