traditional physical stores

Because here we are not big on getting crazy, but the truth is that we have had a month of dramatic movements in the industry whose real scope, frankly, is impossible to gauge for now. The news of ‘GTA VI‘ about its price and format, the unflattering business movements of Xbox and, now, an unexpected announcement from Sony. Well, we lied. There is a consequence of all this that is easy to gauge: it is going to be difficult for traditional video game stores to get out of this crisis, if they manage to do so.

What Sony has announced. The production of physical Blu-Ray discs of all the new games that come out on their consoles will be discontinued from January 2028. Sony speaks of a “natural direction” to adapt to consumer trends, and that “the overall preference for digital media significantly exceeds physical discs” adding that this decision “will allow us to align more closely with the way in which the majority of our community prefers to access and play games today.”

There are analysts who read the announcement as a guarantee that PS6 It will not arrive before 2028, and when it does, Its base version will do without a disk reader. In any case, it is obvious that Sony has crunched the numbers and made the most beneficial decision for its accounts, but… is it beneficial for the industry as a whole? And for businesses that make a living from software?

What Rockstar tells. A GameStop employee summarized the ‘GTA VI’ pre-order day on Reddit with a single figure: they had gotten five reservations. And they expected five hundred. Because Sony’s announcement comes just a few days after Rockstar confirmed that the physical edition of ‘GTA VI’ will not include a disc, It will only consist of a box with a download code. Not even the title that is going to sell the most units (figuratively) in years has a physical disc: a perfect prologue for what Sony has announced, which we can define without fear of exaggeration as the death of the physical format in video games.

It was seen coming. Capcom and PlayStation have been advancing this Sony decision with their financial balances for five years. 93% of Capcom’s video game sales during its last fiscal year they were digitalcompared to 90% the previous year and 75% in 2022. PlayStation went from 19% of digital sales in fiscal year 2015 to 78% on average in 2025, with a quarterly record of 85%. In Spain, the physical market closed 2024 with a turnover 18.11% lower than the previous year, while digital games rose 19.75%.

They are not the only ones. In its financial report at the end of fiscal year 2026, Nintendo spoke of digital sales of games on its platforms adding 25% more than the previous yearreaching 54.6% of total software sales. In the case of Xbox, there is also data: 66% of Xbox Series X|S sold in the United States during 2025 were units without a disc reader

The problem with physical stores. GameStop closed 590 stores in the United States during fiscal year 2024 and has added more than 400 additional closures by early 2026. In Spain and other European countries, GAME gradually dismantled its business of exchanging and selling second-hand consoles already in 2024, while GameStop reinforced the sale of collectibles and merchandising.

In fact, in its annual report for fiscal year 2025, Gamestop said that software revenue had fallen 27.5% and hardware and accessories by 12.3%, while the sale of collectibles had grown by 47.7%. That is to say, the store no longer lives by selling and reselling games, but rather by everything it has found as best it could to replace them. Video game stores are going to become (those that last) stores of objects related to video games… with the exception of the games themselves.

Goodbye to second hand. Record production to end in January 2028 strikes down the second handa secondary market that indirectly benefited console manufacturers and whose real scope is impossible to gauge at the moment (the question is: will consoles sell as much if we cannot pay more affordable prices for used games?) We went, in any case, with digital, to paying for a renewable license, not for a game. The true validity of what we possess is more in doubt than ever: ask the users of ‘The Crew‘ when Ubisoft closed its servers, and more recently (just a couple of days ago, with Sony again as the protagonist!) to StudioCanal content buyers who PlayStation Store will withdraw from its users’ libraries starting in September.

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