When did you last buy a physical game?
Physical game sales in 2024 were 85% below their 2008 peak. By 2023, only 17% of console games worldwide were sold on physical media. When you include PC games, which are almost entirely digital, approximately 95% of all games sold are digital. The death of physical media wasn’t a sudden apocalypse but a slow bleed that nobody noticed until it was already over.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
Global physical game revenue fell nearly 10% in 2024, dropping to $8.5 billion. The PC segment tells the starkest story: physical media now accounts for only 1% of the overall PC gaming market, nearly disappearing altogether. Consoles fared slightly better at 16%, but even that represents a market in terminal decline rather than sustainable equilibrium.
In the UK, boxed game sales in 2024 fell by 35% year-on-year, now representing just 10.4% of new game sales. The trajectory isn’t ambiguous. Physical media is disappearing faster each year despite total gaming revenue holding steady or growing. People aren’t buying fewer games, they’re just buying them digitally. The format transition is complete whether consumers actively chose it or simply accepted it through accumulated small decisions.
The timeline of Sony’s PlayStation data demonstrates the acceleration. Sony’s own data shows full-game downloads on PlayStation jumped from only 19% of sales in 2015 to 70% by 2022. That’s a complete inversion in seven years. The transition didn’t happen gradually across decades but compressed into a single console generation. Anyone who took a break from gaming between 2015 and 2022 would return to find the entire distribution model transformed.
When Hardware Manufacturers Stopped Pretending
The death of physical media became official when console manufacturers released digital-only hardware. In 2020 Sony and Microsoft both offered diskless hardware options at launch – a first for home consoles. The PS5 Digital Edition and Xbox Series S arrived without disc drives, establishing digital-only consoles as legitimate alternatives rather than experimental sidegrades. The pricing differential made the choice obvious—save £100 upfront by accepting you’ll never own physical games again.
The hardware evolution mirrored broader elimination of physical media players across all devices. Best Buy will stop selling DVDs and Blu-ray discs entirely in 2024, having already phased out music CDs back in 2018. Gaming followed the pattern established by music and film, where physical media transitioned from standard to niche to effectively extinct within a decade. The infrastructure for physical media disappeared across entertainment industries simultaneously, creating feedback loops where reduced availability accelerated the shift toward digital.
PC gaming abandoned physical media earlier and more completely than consoles. By the early 2010s, gaming PCs shipped without optical drives as standard. The Steam platform, launched in 2004, established digital distribution as default for PC gaming years before consoles followed. The PC market served as proof-of-concept that digital distribution could completely replace physical media without collapsing the industry. Console manufacturers watched PC gaming thrive without physical media and concluded the transition was inevitable rather than risky.
The Retail Apocalypse
GameStop’s collapse demonstrates what happens when your entire business model depends on physical media sales. The company operated over 6,000 global stores in the mid-2010s at its peak. By early 2025 it stood at around 3,200 stores worldwide. GameStop closed 590 stores in the U.S. alone during fiscal 2024, and the company warned it expected to close a “significant number of additional stores” in fiscal 2025. Reports in January 2026 suggested another 400-500 stores had closed or were closing, bringing the total reduction to roughly half the company’s footprint eliminated in two years.
The international retreat tells the same story. During fiscal 2023, GameStop exited its operations in Austria, Ireland, and Switzerland. During the fourth quarter of fiscal 2024, it closed down store operations in Germany and sold its Italian subsidiary, GameStop Italy S.r.l, which operated the chain’s Italian stores and e-commerce business. The company isn’t restructuring for efficiency but conducting managed retreat from markets where physical game retail no longer functions as viable business.
The closures aren’t just GameStop’s problem. In the UK, the last major game chain (GAME) has reduced shelf space and even stopped pre-orders and pre-owned game sales. The pre-owned market—which sustained specialist game retailers by creating ongoing transaction fees from the same physical copies—disappeared along with physical media itself. In the U.S., big retailers devote far less space to game discs than in years past, relegating what remains to shrinking endcaps rather than dedicated aisles. The retail infrastructure for physical games is being dismantled piece by piece.
Why Digital Won Completely
The convenience gap between physical and digital is insurmountable. Digital purchases happen instantly from home. No driving to stores, no checking stock availability, no shelf space consumed by game cases, no disc required in the drive to play. The download starts immediately and the game is ready after installation. For people with adequate internet speeds, digital distribution provides objectively superior user experience across every metric except ownership rights.
The pricing also favored digital adoption. Steam sales offering 50-75% discounts trained an entire generation to wait for deep sales rather than purchasing at launch. The psychological shift from “buy at launch or wait for used copies” to “wait for Steam sale” changed purchasing patterns while simultaneously eliminating the used game market that physical media enabled. Publishers preferred this outcome because used sales generated zero revenue whilst digital sales—even heavily discounted—provided ongoing income streams.
Day-one patches also undermined physical media’s value proposition. Buying a disc doesn’t mean avoiding downloads when a 50GB day-one patch is required before the game reaches playable state. The disc becomes an authentication token rather than a complete product, eliminating the offline play advantage physical media supposedly provides. If internet connection is required to patch the game anyway, the distinction between owning a disc and owning a digital license becomes functionally meaningless for actual play.
What We Lost
The resale market died with physical media. Game shops where you could trade in completed games for partial credit toward your next purchase don’t function with digital libraries. The inability to recoup any money from finished games means paying full price for temporary entertainment rather than partial price offset by resale value. The consumer loss is significant even if convenience gains feel worth the trade-off individually.
Game sharing between friends also disappeared. The practice of buying different games then swapping after completion let friends access multiple titles for the cost of one each. Digital libraries can’t be loaned, traded, or genuinely shared outside platform-specific family sharing features with heavy restrictions. The social element of physical game sharing vanished along with the financial benefit of informal lending libraries among friend groups.
The permanence also disappeared. Physical discs work as long as the console can read them, regardless of online services, store operations, or publisher decisions. Digital games require functioning stores, active accounts, and publisher permission through license verification. The ownership difference becomes obvious when comparing a disc you can keep forever versus a digital license that disappears when any link in the authentication chain breaks.
The preservation problem compounds over time. Physical media distributed globally created preservation through redundancy—hundreds of thousands of copies exist in personal collections, used game stores, and archives ensuring games survive even when publishers abandon them. Digital distribution creates single points of failure where publisher shutting down servers eliminates access completely. Stop Killing Games exists precisely because digital distribution’s default state is impermanence.
The Blockbuster Parallel
The irony is subscription services recreating the rental model whilst calling it innovation. Game Pass and PlayStation Plus provide temporary access to rotating game libraries for monthly fees, which is exactly what video rental stores did with physical media. The industry reinvented Blockbuster’s business model whilst eliminating Blockbuster’s competitor—the ability to own games outright. You can rent games through subscriptions or buy revocable licenses through digital stores, but you can’t actually own games anymore because the infrastructure to support ownership no longer exists.
The generational divide mirrors what happened with video rental. Younger gamers who started after 2015 have no reference point for physical media existing as the default. Going to a store to buy a game exists as historical curiosity rather than lived experience. The transition happened fast enough that different age cohorts inhabit completely different realities about what “buying a game” means—permanent ownership versus revocable license to access.
Why Nobody Fought Back
The benefits of physical media—ownership, resale rights, offline play—are theoretical for most users who never exercise those rights anyway. The ability to resell games matters less when you never actually resell them. The offline play capability matters less when you’re always online. The ownership rights matter less when you never lose access through account closures or service shutdowns. Abstract benefits can’t compete with concrete convenience of instant digital access.
The environmental argument also provides moral justification. No plastic cases, no disc manufacturing, no shipping logistics, no retail shelf space. The carbon footprint of producing and distributing physical media exceeds digital distribution’s server and bandwidth costs. The environmental benefit allows people to feel good about a transition that would have happened anyway through convenience factors alone.
The visual satisfaction of physical collections transferred to digital interfaces. Steam libraries displaying hundreds of games create the same collection pride physical shelves did. The psychological ownership feeling persists through digital storefronts showing games you “own” even though legal ownership doesn’t exist. The illusion is sufficient for people who never test it by attempting actions genuine ownership would enable—like selling, trading, or lending their games.
The Point of No Return
The industry moved to digital completely without asking permission or providing genuine choice. Console manufacturers released digital-only hardware. PC hardware stopped including disc drives. Publishers stopped producing physical copies for major releases. The transition wasn’t consumer-driven decision but corporate choice prioritizing profit margins from digital distribution over consumer preferences for physical ownership.
The financial incentives made physical media’s death inevitable. No manufacturing costs, no retail partnerships, no used game market cannibalizing new sales, no storage or shipping logistics. Digital distribution is more profitable at every stage from production through sale, creating irresistible business case for abandoning physical regardless of consumer preferences or ownership implications.
GameStop’s CEO Ryan Cohen was recently offered up to $35 billion in performance-based stock options, contingent on significantly raising the company’s market cap and earnings, whilst simultaneously closing hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of workers. The juxtaposition captures the situation perfectly—executives being rewarded for managing decline whilst workers lose their jobs because the business model supporting their employment ceased to exist. The company isn’t adapting to serve customers better but conducting controlled demolition whilst extracting maximum value for shareholders and leadership.
The question of whether the superior convenience of digital distribution justifies eliminating physical media entirely becomes moot when physical media no longer exists as viable option. You can’t choose what isn’t available. The infrastructure disappeared, the retail chains closed, the hardware manufacturers stopped including the drives. The choice was made by industry in aggregate through individual profit-maximizing decisions, and consumers adapted to the new reality because fighting it would have required caring more than we did.
Physical games are dead. The disc drives disappeared from hardware. GameStop is closing thousands of stores. The industry moved to digital distribution completely without asking whether we wanted choice between convenient access and genuine ownership. We just accepted the transition because arguing would have required organizing collective resistance, and convenience is a powerful anaesthetic against caring about abstract ownership rights we rarely exercise anyway.
Does the convenience of instant digital downloads justify eliminating physical media entirely, or should the industry have preserved consumer choice between genuine ownership and revocable licenses?
