Don’t let the rows of boxes on store shelves deceive you — video games are now a digital commodity.
In 2024, global sales for video games comprised 95.4% digital downloads, good for $175.8 billion in revenue versus just $8.5 billion for physical releases. For consoles, like Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Nintendo’s Switch 2, CDs and game cartridges fared a bit better at about 16% of total sales, but on PC, just 1% of all games purchased last year were physical media.
Increasingly, those products in the stores may not even contain the game itself. In May, Doom: The Dark Ages, the latest entry in the popular shooter series, shipped with only a fraction of the game’s full data on physical discs, with players needing to download 85 gigabytes of data when first running it. And in December, the disc for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle included just 20 out of a hefty 120GB.
