The market research also indicates there is historically a floor of resilience with any physical media, and the most interesting part is the reasons stated by gamers for staying with physical, which are impossible to provide any other way (ignoring the idea of cracking consoles or having games distributed unencrypted).
Gamers have a collection which they bought precisely because they want to keep those games forever. Spending ratios don't represent this reality at all. I buy physical whenever the game is very important to me, but on paper my spending is probably 50/50 digital/physical because I buy many indies, non-AAA titles like remasters, DLCs, and I now have to pay for a PS Plus subscription which I didn't before. A lot of my spending have become impulsive and opportunistic where there are sales. So while I might buy fewer discs, and more digital stuff, that doesn't make physical games any less critical to my platform of choice. The above UK poll is about gamers "preference", it doesn't really contradict the NPD data which is about spending amount.
Games which are competitive FPS, or yearly sports titles, have no reason to be owned on disc. They are ephemeral consumption. Previously these titles would be all disc sales, now they should skew severely towards DD. Nobody wants to collect those.
Similar thing goes on for films, today those buying physical copies of films are mostly the important ones which they really care about. At the beginning of DVD people had crazy collections of 1000 discs, 900 of which they'd never watch again. I see games shifting the same way. But try to take away the most important game on physical media which might later look like only 10% or 20% of the market, and it will crash and burn.
Gamers have a collection which they bought precisely because they want to keep those games forever. Spending ratios don't represent this reality at all. I buy physical whenever the game is very important to me, but on paper my spending is probably 50/50 digital/physical because I buy many indies, non-AAA titles like remasters, DLCs, and I now have to pay for a PS Plus subscription which I didn't before. A lot of my spending have become impulsive and opportunistic where there are sales. So while I might buy fewer discs, and more digital stuff, that doesn't make physical games any less critical to my platform of choice. The above UK poll is about gamers "preference", it doesn't really contradict the NPD data which is about spending amount.
Games which are competitive FPS, or yearly sports titles, have no reason to be owned on disc. They are ephemeral consumption. Previously these titles would be all disc sales, now they should skew severely towards DD. Nobody wants to collect those.
Similar thing goes on for films, today those buying physical copies of films are mostly the important ones which they really care about. At the beginning of DVD people had crazy collections of 1000 discs, 900 of which they'd never watch again. I see games shifting the same way. But try to take away the most important game on physical media which might later look like only 10% or 20% of the market, and it will crash and burn.
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