According to retail data, 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine sales were physical discs. This comes from Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), which tracks sales data across major markets globally.
The data suggests Wolverine shifted 2.16 million units in September (it went on sale September 15), and a significant portion of those sales were on-disc. In Europe, 51% of Wolverine sales came from the boxed version. Zooming in, more than two thirds were physical sales in France, but two thirds were digital in the UK.
A console business largely lives and dies by how many customers it has in the first place, so cutting out double digit percentages of them sounds like a hell of a bad idea to me. As an anecdote, I’ve got friends who buy plenty of digital games on consoles because there is no physical option, but when physical is an option, they do so. That sounds like you could easily convince them to just buy everything on digital then, right? Well, maybe not. If physical is never an option, they’d wonder why they bother with a console in the first place, since they can’t save money on used copies (either selling a new copy and recouping some cost or buying used at a discount) ever. At that point, why not just play on PC where the online is free and the discounts are better? With no disc drive, they lose most of their reason for playing on console at all.
Anyway, it looks stupid to me to cut out the physical market in the 2020s, and I haven’t even bought a physical game for 4 years.
Reading it back I think I’ve might’ve come across as defending the decision. I am and I’m not. I do think what Sony is doing is stupid and in the simple digital vs physical argument they shouldn’t be getting rid of physical. That said, I think the real problem that people are feeling but maybe not being able articulate isn’t getting rid of physical, it’s getting rid of what physical represents. For the PS physical media is an alternative to the PS store. It gives customers some control over the pricing because if the digital store price is too high they can go and see if they can find a physical version for cheaper (or make it cheaper by buying it full price and then selling it after you’re done). It also gives them a product instead of a license (though even that is getting somewhat questionable when the physical disc no longer contains the product but just the license to access the product), which is a stark contrast to the PS store where Sony will happily revoke your licenses if you don’t do exactly as they say.
Without the physical option Sony gains effectively complete control over the pricing of PS games and how the sold licenses get used. Had Sony approached this from the perspective of the consumer they should’ve seen that to go digital only they need to do more than just go digital only. This is a hypothetical but I imagine there wouldn’t have been any real controversy if Sony had announced two more things with the digital only announcement. Open up the platform to third party storefronts (realistically that along would’ve shut up most people because now everyone is giddy at the thought of Steam coming to the PS) and give consumers (some) digital ownership of purchases done from the PS store such as being able to transfer your license to another user. You’d still get physical media fans being upset but that would be nowhere near as big of a outcry as what Sony is currently getting.
But Sony went with the MBA number crunching solution which I described before. Who cares what the customers want as long as the balance sheet looks positive.