Nintendo remains the biggest physical media holdout among the big three console manufacturers, as Xbox has spent years centering its business on cloud and Game Pass and PlayStation is making plans to exit physical media entirely. The company's latest financial report confirms that well over a third of the company's software sales are still physical, but the split is slowly starting to favor digital more and more.
60.7% of Nintendo game sales were digital from April through September 2026, the company reports. That's down 6.2% from the same period last year. These numbers are measuring money generated rather than individual unit sales, so Nintendo warns that "the continued weakness of the yen" is a factor, but it also saw "an increase in sales of the downloadable versions of packaged software."
In a smaller, three-month period running from January through March 2026, the proportion of digital sales rose as high as 67.2%, but that's when the Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen re-releases landed, a notable digital-only outlier. The digital proportion has hovered closer to the 50% mark in recent years, but that's clearly starting to change in a more permanent way.
Notably, none of this data includes digital copies of Mario Kart World that are included in Switch 2 bundles, which means that the true proportion of digital game ownership on the platform is even higher.
A recent survey of "premium gamers" suggests that around 30% of console games owned are physical, so Nintendo fans remain a bit of an outlier in their dedication to hard copy media. Still, Nintendo has insisted it has "no plans to ditch physical games" and its dedication to the format has proven an easy marketing win amid the backlash that Sony now faces.
