The games industry will undergo a sea change in early 2028, with Sony ceasing production of PlayStation discs. Despite the pushback on this decision, it remains in place, and data from Square Enix certainly affirms that the gaming audience is already going digital.
According to the company's latest earnings report, significantly more players are already purchasing their games digitally. In a slide breaking down units sold across video games in digital entertainment, we can see that 90.11% of all game sales are "downloads" rather than "packaged."
This comes from numbers in North America, Europe, Japan, and Asia, and the rest of the world. That's a pretty large disparity, underpinning a clear preference for digital over physical purchasing.
But the situation isn't that clear-cut. You have to consider what people's options actually are. Buying physical games can be relatively tricky depending on where you live - there may not be a brick-and-mortar store nearby, forcing you to buy online. It might be both cheaper and more convenient to simply get the game you want on the PlayStation Store, Steam, or whatever.
Then you have releases that are only available digitally for the time being, like the HD remasters of Final Fantasy 10 and 10-2 for Switch 2. These are on top of Final Fantasy 14, which is predominantly sold online - though you can technically get a packaged version of old versions.
Physical game sales often appear smaller than they actually are when they're pit against combined digital sales that include microtransactions, DLC, and subscriptions on top of full game sales, and that's especially true for Square Enix given the Final Fantasy 14-sized hippo hanging off its game figures.
It's similar to the logic we've seen from Capcom, which reckons 95% of its sales will be digital over the next fiscal year. That's all well and good, but for the majority of PC players alone, there's no other option, so of course the stats will skew that way.
Market forces, not just preferences, are pushing people towards non-physical sources for games. Ultimately, just because the majority does something a certain way, it doesn't mean the others should be forgotten, which is the main argument against Sony's new policy. That said, figures are figures, and Square Enix's audience is, like many, all about digital products.
