Physical game buyers may account for a smaller share of PlayStation’s sales, but Sony’s disc exit risks upsetting fans who still spend heavily on its single-player games, according to Alinea Analytics analyst Rhys Elliott.
In the latest Alinea Insight newsletter, Elliott highlights the awkward split behind Sony’s digital push. Big single-player releases still draw a substantial share of their sales from discs, while sports games already lean heavily toward downloads.
That means the shift could hit fans of the games most closely tied to PlayStation’s identity harder than customers who have already moved to digital.
Sony announced in July that physical disc production for new PlayStation releases will end from January 2028. The company said the decision reflects players’ growing preference for digital games.
“The awkward bit is that physical revenues are driven by the prestige single-player games PlayStation is built on, while the sports and live-service titles Sony increasingly leans on are already nearly all-digital,” Elliott writes.
“So the backlash is mostly a vocal minority of a revenue minority. But it’s a minority that really matters, and a minority that spends a lot of money on PlayStation.”
Alinea’s estimates show the gap. Physical copies generated around 32.3% of Wolverine’s PlayStation game revenue, worth an estimated $64.6 million. Nearly 800,000 of its estimated 2.6 million copies sold were physical.
Discs played an even larger role for some third-party single-player games. Physical editions accounted for an estimated 43.5% of PlayStation game revenue for both Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword.
Those figures are Alinea’s estimates, rather than sales totals announced by the games’ publishers. They show the importance of discs to individual releases, though they do not establish how much physical buyers spend across PlayStation as a whole.
The split looks very different for sports games. Physical editions accounted for just 8.9% of FC 27’s estimated PlayStation game-sales revenue and 4.6% of NBA 2K27’s.
Those percentages cover purchases of the games themselves, rather than total earnings including in-game spending.
Elliott points to digital deluxe editions as a reason for the shift. Early access, players and boosters encourage customers to buy digitally, especially those focused on modes such as Ultimate Team and MyTeam.
For those players, Sony’s decision changes less about how they already buy games. For disc buyers, it removes the option to purchase used copies, lend games or sell them after finishing.
Elliott argues that most physical customers will switch to digital, limiting the revenue Sony could lose. He sees the bigger problem as how the company explains the change and helps players through it.
Sony’s challenge is that a smaller sales share does not make those customers unimportant. Its digital push could improve the return on each purchase while frustrating the audience still buying boxed copies of its biggest single-player games.
