This year has not really been PlayStation's year. The console's exclusive lineup has struggled to make the kind of impact Sony needed, with Wolverine drawing mixed responses and failing to offer what IGN described as "an occasional middle ground." The bigger controversy, though, has been Sony's speedy march toward an all-digital future. While the company has made it clear that no amount of backlash is changing that decision, new data raises a fair question about whether it should.
Figures from Alinea Analytics show the revenue split for first-party Sony games since 2022, and the numbers make a strong case that physical media is still pulling its weight. All but one of the seven titles covered sold between 32% and 47% of copies through physical retail.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 generated $1.2 billion in total revenue, with 35% coming from physical sales. Ghost of Yotei brought in $400 million, with nearly 40% from discs. A similar split played out across GOTY winner Astro Bot, Stellar Blade, Death Stranding 2, and others in the dataset.
The one outlier was Helldivers II, where physical sales accounted for just 8.3% of its $235 million in revenue, with 91.7% coming digitally. That gap is not surprising. Multiplayer games tend to find their audiences through digital storefronts, where updates, patches, and friends lists live in one place. Single-player titles are a different story, and the data suggests that gamers are more keen to own physical copies as collector's items for their favourite story-driven games. That also explains why so many gamers are disappointed with GTA 6 not having a physical disc version at launch.
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What the data makes harder to dismiss is Sony's reasoning for abandoning discs entirely, especially since physical sales are not a rounding error here and represent a meaningful slice of revenue on some of the company's biggest releases. The question worth sitting with is whether Sony jumped the gun or the writing was always on the wall.
