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Nintendo reports a full 38.5% of its sales are still physical in the wake of Sony abandoning discs
(www.gamesradar.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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But that raises the question. Why is Nintendo adding so much digital-only purchases to the statistics? The current narrative is that Nintendo wants physical media to stay, so why would they be skewing the statistics so much just like Sony has been doing if they were so pro-physical?
Because Nintendo did not provide these statistics (directly). This is data mined from their financial filings. Nintendo reported their total software revenue and broke it down between transactions that occurred via their digital store front and outside of it. At the surface level, Nintendo is just explaining to its investors why it is worth selling via both a first party digital store (which is a large expense I imagine) and third party stores.
Any assumptions about physical vs. digital game sales are strictly coming from reporters pulling numbers out of context.
To counter PlayStation's narrative I should think. Calling out their bullshit in essence. Come on Microsoft, announce a disc drive for next gen and really give Sony a middle finger!
XBOX has even less physical sales than PlayStation. I think they were at over 90% digital even few years back. Even the games they release, (some of these?) are "unofficial Game Key Cards", with disc only containing few MBs of data, rest of all is downloaded.
This is not an anti-XBOX comment, just saying they when talking about these 3 consoles, they care the least about physical media.
But that's kind of my point. If Nintendo was trying to break apart Sony's 'no one buys physical anymore' narrative, then why would they be skewing the statistics of their sales so much by not only including purchases of digital-only games, but also throwing in all sales of DLC, Switch 2 Edition upgrade packs AND Nintendo Switch Online payments? If they didn't skew the statistics so much, the number of physical game sales would probably be over 50%. They could have destroyed Sony's narrative so much more if they calculated everything properly.
Because the metric that matters to the games companies is the proportion of total software revenue that comes from physical sales, not the proportion of games sold that are physical copies.
Exactly. I seriously doubt any of these corps couldn't put together statistics for non-exclusively digital releases vs. their physical counterparts if they really wanted to.
For Sony it makes sense, because the statistics are a means to an end - but Nintendo is trying to justify physical sales, so why are they skewing the data too?? Are they really sabotaging their own argument because they can't be bothered to parse the data properly?
They probably want to switch to subscription and digital only as well eventually, with their NSO NSO+ and NSO++. Think of the profit margin for the quarter when they remove all physical product and lay everyone off.