When Sony recently announced it would be ending the production of physical media for the PS5 (and presumably the PS6) from January 2028, the gaming community was quite rightly up in arms.
Yet despite the ongoing backlash, the actual data indicating how poorly physical media sells these days doesn’t lie. And it’s looking grim, indeed. According to Mat Piscatella from Circana, just two PS5 games sold more than 10,000 physical copies in the US during the week ending 11th July 2026. In addition, only seven have sold more than 100,000 physical copies year-to-date.
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You might be thinking “sure, but that’s PlayStation; Nintendo sells way more physical games”. And yes, you’d probably be right. But in a follow up post, Christopher Dring, who runs The Game Business, notes that just 1,000 physical sales would have netted the number nine spot in last week’s UK sales chart.
Now, which game was at number ten last week..? Ah yes – Star Fox. And Pokémon Legends: Z-A was at number nine, with sales split between Switch 2 and Switch, 60% and 40% respectively.
So Star Fox, less than a month from its launch on 25th June, sold 1,000 copies or less physically during week ending 18th July. That’s insane. This writer remembers just little more than a decade ago, a single GAME store would shift upwards of 100 units of a recently-released title in just one day. 1,000 sales across the entire region in a week is dire.
And this is probably why we’ve not heard anything from Sony. As much as fans want to protest, it seems highly unlikely the company will backtrack from its decision to ditch physical media. The sales just aren’t there anymore.
Our personal preference would be to simply downscale the production of physical media to meet the remaining demand. There are many folks out there who simply won’t entertain the idea of buying digital, and it seems a damn shame to just ignore their needs entirely. Movies and music have proven that physical media still has a place in modern society – why should games be any different?
