Digital is 90% of Capcom's game sales, expected to rise to 94% this year

Physical gaming is slowly being ebbed away as digital continues its dominant sales streak for major publishers like Capcom.

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Capcom wants to eventually sell 100 million games per year, and it has a plan on how to make it happen: Carefully drive up sales through specific platforms using the tools provided. This plan usually sees Capcom deeply discount its games on digital platforms like Steam, the Nintendo eShop, and the PlayStation and Xbox stores. As we can see from the company's FY24 earnings report, the results speak for themselves.

According to the data, digital made up 90% of Capcom's total software sales for the year. The company hopes digital will hit 94% this fiscal year (FY25, the current period, which ends in March 2026).

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In total, Capcom sold 51.87 million games in FY24, of which only 5.42 million were physical games (~10% of the total). Digital made up 46.73 million game sales. This trend makes more sense for a company like Capcom that has prioritized two major goals that are connected, aiming to achieve higher operating profit margins through digital distribution and an effort to drive up high volumes of game sales through carefully-curated promotional price drops.

Capcom president and chief operating officer Haruhiro Tsujimoto explains in the earnings briefing:

"We sold 51.87 million units for fiscal year 2024 with a significant increase in PC sales year. In fiscal year 2025, we plan to increase our sales volume to 54 million units

"We are aiming to achieve our long-term goal of 100 million units in annual sales.

"As you can see, unit sales volume has increased since fiscal year 2014 for 10 consecutive years due to promoting catalog tile sales and more recently the steady release of major hit titles.

"In conjunction with the shift to digital, selling our catalog tiles globally became possible and we have maintained a ratio of over 10% catalog title sales in recent years. We will continue to focus on expanding globally, particularly in rapidly growing emerging markets."