Amid Sony's plan to end physical games on PlayStation, Nintendo has confirmed that 38.5% of its sales are still physical.
Digital vs physical games have been a massive topic of discussion as of late, thanks to Rockstar Games announcing that the only physical copies of GTA 6 will be code-in-box releases, which was soon followed by Sony confirming that it will stop making disks in 2028.
Naturally, this caused outrage among players who want to continue growing their physical collection for myriad reasons – be it collecting, preservation, or simply options.
However, publishers haven't really been as upset. While some like Astrolabe Games and Serenity Forge have spoken out against it, Capcom, for example, isn't too worried.
In Nintendo's latest financial results, the company revealed that in the previous quarter it made 132.7 billion yen from digital sales, which is not only a 90% year-on-year increase but also a 2.2% increase in the proportion of digital sales compared to the same time last year. This meant that 61.5% of Nintendo's sales were from digital purchases between March 30 and June 30, 2026.
Now granted, 38.5% isn't a small piece of the pie at all; however, there are a few caveats with the figure. Firstly, Nintendo confirms that Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions, download-only titles and DLC – including upgrade packs for Nintendo Switch 2 Edition games – are included in this figure. On top of that, games bundled within hardware packages – like the Mario Kart World Switch 2 bundle at launch – are recognized as hardware sales, and thus not included in this.
Obviously, the decline of physical games is a net negative for the industry, but between this and word from industry analyst Mat Piscatella that, in 2026, only seven games on PlayStation have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year, the writing may have been on the wall for a while.
Granted, so far it seems like Nintendo is still all-in on its own titles being physical releases, with none of its first-party releases – barring Pokemon Pokopia, which isn't published by Nintendo in every region – being proper releases.
