I am shockingly out of touch (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, April 23, 2017, 05:57 (2558 days ago) @ Cody Miller

The NPD group now more accurately tracks digital sales of video games. How much do they say now is spent on physical discs?

In 2017 so far just 26%. This is down from 69% in 2010.

To me this is pretty incredible. Digital distribution is much more prevalent than I could have ever imagined. I'm the 26%. I still generally refuse to buy digital on a console, because an all digital console is a much higher risk than on the PC for locking you out of your games.

The big pro of a disc is that you can resell it. The big pro of digital is that you don't need a disc, nor do you need to go to a store to buy a disc. That latter bit is pretty compelling. Also, some (not all) digital content providers keep an account history, so you can always recover your games if the console they're on is broken or stolen. With a physical disc, if it's stolen, it's gone forever.

Also, I'd like to point out:

- DLC is, by definition, download-only, so that skews things a bit.
- Microtransactions are all download-only, again skewing things.
- Cell phones are a *massive* market and none of them have disc drives.
- Not sure if this is included, but I presently pay $120 a year to subscribe to both Xbox Live and PS+. There is no "disc" for those services, so they could also be skewing the numbers.