Capcom's latest financial result is acting as a glass filled to the precise half-way mark in the physical media debate. On the half-empty side? Overall game sales are now more than 93% digital, and Capcom expects that share to grow even higher next year. For those who take a half-full outlook, though, the digital share of console game sales isn't nearly as extreme.
Capcom sold 1.6 million physical games in the three months running from April through June 2026, which included the launch of Pragmata, according to the publisher's latest financial report. That ain't nothing, but compared to the 22.2 million digital sales reported in the same period? Well, you might start to see why a financial analyst would suggest that digital is not just the future, but the present.
That means that 93.3% of sales for the quarter were made up of digital games, and the company expects the digital share to be even higher for the overall fiscal year, which concludes in March 2027. By then, Capcom expects a whopping 95.4% of sales to be digital.
But there's one big caveat: Capcom says that 60.4% of sales for this quarter were on PC, where digital is effectively the only option. The company reports that 6.7% of its sales are physical, and we can safely assume that all of those are on console. That would mean around 16.9% of sales on console are made up of physical games.
It's worth noting that Capcom has historically counted sales of game-key cards on Switch 2 as digital sales rather than physical units. So whether or not you consider game-key cards to be 'real' physical games, just know that Capcom is putting them in the digital column.
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of sales for the quarter – 89.3% – were back catalog titles, which benefit heavily from big digital sales on platforms like Steam.
So how do we interpret this data? Well, Sony's certainly looking at these kinds of figures and deciding that physical PlayStation games no longer need to exist. By the same token, I doubt any publisher would happily give up 6.7% of its sales – but I'm sure the theory is that former physical game buyers will simply migrate to digital stores.
The proportion of new game sales happening on physical media is likely a bit higher than a cursory glance at the numbers would lead you to believe, but there's no denying that the majority of gamers have already gone digital, no matter which way you slice it.
