Physical game sales made up just 3% of PlayStation revenue

Physical game sales have been on a downward trend for many years but with next-gen consoles due in the next few years, many have been anticipating the complete abandonment of the disc drive. Sony recently shared its latest earnings report, showing that just 3% of revenue came via physical game sales. 

In the recent breakdown of PlayStation revenue, Sony showed that 24% of sales came from hardware. From there, 20% of sales revenue came from Digital Software and just 3% came from physical software sales. Add-on content accounted for 29% of revenue, dwarfing game sales and hardware sales.

As for subscription services, the likes of PlayStation Plus and other network services brought in 14% of the overall revenue. As Eurogamer points out, this is a drop down from 17% in 2020, despite Sony's reported Monthly Active Users growing by double digit percentages.

The revenue breakdown shows why Sony has been distancing itself from disc drives. While the PS5 was originally designed with a disc drive in mind, Sony later shifted to only producing Digital Edition PS5 models and then offering a separate disc-drive attachment. It is expected that the next generation PlayStation 6 console will release without a disc drive, but Sony should continue to offer a disc drive attachment as an additional purchase.

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KitGuru Says: Gaming has been a largely digital market for a long time now, especially on the PC side of things. Console gaming has taken longer to transition but numbers like this make it clear that console users largely rely on digital services now as well.  

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