The storm caused by PlayStation announcing the end of videogame discs in 2028 just keeps going. With the user backlash to the situation still ongoing, Chet Faliszek, the writer for Left 4 Dead and former Valve employee, has come out and said that “you, the consumer, have made a choice, and your choice is for digital”. This is part of a seven-and-a-half minute video posted on his YouTube channel.
As part of his argument, he brings up the numbers from GameStop, and PlayStation itself. From the former, it was the bit where company CEO Ryan Cohen said that its software business was only 18% of its revenue in the most recent quarter. As for the latter, this is similarly, the digital games download ratio in the last quarter, which was 85%. That being said, the one from PlayStation can be pretty contentious as it’s probably not taking into account second-hand sales, or games that only exist in digital form.
Going further, Faliszek says that digital sales are being under-reported, simply because “they’re not reporting Steam. Let’s not even get into mobile. And what was Game Pass? Game Pass was digital only. You as the consumer have forced the large corporation’s hand, and you’ve told them ‘stop with retail’”. And now it’s too late to reverse course, he says. “You should have started protesting Game Pass, and stopped buying Xbox games, and stopped buying digital, but you didn’t, because it’s easier”.
Similarly, Circana analyst Mat Piscatella has shared that only seven physical PlayStation games have sold more than 100,000 copies in the year. Granted, this data is specifically only in the US, but it does point towards the rationale behind the end of physical discs. And in an older post from just before the PlayStation announcement, Piscatella has said that the second-hand market is so small it basically “doesn’t really matter”, in addition to driving the point for digital-only further.
(Source: Chet Faliszek / YouTube, Mat Piscatella / BlueSky [1], [2])
