PlayStation 5 owners prefer boxed games to downloads

[the-pi-guy]

The figure comes from Global Sales Data's presentation at GI Live: London last month, where the firm's video games consultant Sam Naji took a deeper look at the console's cumulative sales from its launch in November 2020 to the end of August 2021.

GSD tracks full-game boxed sales from 23 countries and digital sales from 49 and covers all the major publishers.

The company found that retail has consistently outsold digital, with 51% more boxed games sold than downloads by the end of August.

November 2020 was the only month where full-game downloads have outperformed retail sales at 950,000 units compared to 840,000. After this, PS5's retail games have consistently outsold digital every month.

PlayStation 5 owners prefer boxed games to downloads | GamesIndustry.biz

[the-pi-guy]

On the one hand I doubt this will change anything, as most of those games aren't a $70 title.

But it'd be interesting if Sony opted away from $70, as selling $60 digital games with higher margins might be preferable to selling $70 physical games at lower ones.

[the-pi-guy]

Couple of points about this takeaway:

1. GSD data tracks nearly 100% of the physical market, but it only has access to a few publishers for digital data.

2. The data only looks at games with a PS5 SKU, which ignores PS4 games or non PS5 SKU games purchased on PS5. https://t.co/WzR1wR3xDm

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 19, 2021

If we were to look at all units sold across PS4 and PS5 for the last few quarters, it's fairly obvious that the 50% threshold was passed a while back.

The digital download ratio was 62% last quarter, and 71% the quarter before.

No doubt skews lower on PS5 and higher on PS4 tho pic.twitter.com/qp7BiYRuMG

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 19, 2021