LogFAQs > #976678503

We can see in Japan that barely anyone is buying PS5 games over there.

Meanwhile Apex Legends second biggest market is Japan. Genshin Impact makes a third of its revenue in Japan. Those games are why people are buying a PS5 over there. Saying that they prefer physical is overall still simplifying it pretty dramatically. Switch is basically holding up the entire 'traditional' gaming market over there and even that is due to the portability of the Switch which has always been more popular in Japan.

I'm not saying that physical games are going to stop being released next year. But we're gonna see stores like Walmart continue to gradually scale things back as more people have move onto F2P games, buying games on sale on digital stores, subscriptions etc.

The physical gaming market is soon just gonna be enthusiasts and people who buy the same IP over and over. It's not gonna make sense for a place like Walmart to have a variety of stock for example so yeah stores like them are gonna scale back to just games people will buy full price for. Which isn't really all that large of a number of titles these days.

Amazon and the like will last a fair bit longer as they don't need to worry about shelf space and enthusiasts can easily order whatever they want.

This stuff takes time. Only now are Best Buy removing physical movies completely.

But overall we're talking about 5% of the revenue of this market. It's not something companies will overly care about as the tide continues to shift. Personally when I go to a department store I can already see how significantly those shelves have shrunk compared to a decade ago.

On top of that yes. There are more and more digital games coming out and less and less physical games.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/fewer-and-fewer-console-games-are-seeing-a-physical-release/
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/8/AACT2jAAE8Bm.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/4/3/9/AACT2jAAE8Bn.jpg