Half of Video Game Software Bought in the UK Last Year was Digital

Note that it says half. That means that the other half is still sold physical.

Meaning that the 2 options need to exist alongside each other instead
Of digital taking over all the way otherwise they will anger and even leave out players who invest in the physical half of the sales. Resulting a drop in overall numbers.

And before you say that that half will just go digital then,well some of them might,but the fact that this chart Has an even split between digital and physical sales means that the disc is still as important as digital.

Does it take in account that some stuff is only available digital. 😁 😃

Yes it does not so its stupid research.

@Quintumply The digital spending include Games, DLC and MTX, right?

It'll be quite an interesting breakdown if the detail becomes available.

Of course I do buy digital, but generally only if there is no physical option or the digital release is significantly discounted in a sale.

Of the PS4 physical releases I've bought/been gifted recently, only 3 have been brand new shop purchases (Ace Combat, NHL 19 and Grip), picked up Spider-Man through trade.

I'd prefer to buy digital and do so for games that I play online regularly but physical is still the cheaper option, for some reason...

UK sales are pretty useless. They are gonna leave EU and their market is more like US than other European countries.

@jdv95 also the digital half includes all digital software sales. So full games, dlc, microtransactions etc. If you would exclude everything that isn’t a full game than it is much less impresive. And even if you go by the 50/50 comparison, considering how many times big companies and shareholders say physical media is death/dying/irrelevant, it still is impressive how much physical media still sells.

It hasn't taken into account the huge Ebay pre-owned market, then the likes of Amazon Marketplace, Gumtree, Music Magpie, Shpock, and all the rest of that ilk, so it's definitely misleading data; particularly given that the're including MTX, dlc etc. Instead of being able to legitimately claim it's 50%, what it does is point to the rising trend of digitally bought titles.

To be honest, I buy almost exclusively digital now, and 90% of those titles are in the sales.

75% of AAA games in the UK are still bought physically (as of Jan 2019). the digital spend is inflated by online subscriptions, dlc, microtransactions, etc. the digital revenue from FIFA UT packs and fortnite packs alone accounts for a couple of hundred million.

That includes PC gaming. I'd be curious to know the percentage of physical games bought on PC.
The last one I bought as a physical on PC was Borderlands 2 in 2012. It required Steam, had DRM and the DVD wasn't working so I had to download it eventually.

Considering that there's been more sales on digital games via the store and some have been at very good prices. And yet physical copies are still higher it's not surprising plus the fact the UK is getting better net speeds across the country. I still buy physical when I can

@Shepherd_Tallon — this article has oversensationalised its headline imo. if you consider the data from GfK (which does physical sales), and GSD (which does download figures), it shows that for games (in so much as ones that make the charts) still are predominantly sold on disc, particularly for consoles. even for the download charts, the data is given by the publishers themselves, based on PSN, XBL, Steam, it's not independently corroborated, and they're often dominated by titles that are in the steam sales. looking at data provided by SuperData for example, last month Apex Legends made as much money digitally (despite being free to play and only relying on MTs) as Anthem did (which is a £60 game for the basic version). this also refers to 'spend', not units. typically on release, you need to sell more physical copies than digital ones to make the same amount of revenue.

This includes DLC, season passes etc so this is a very misleading article

I’m assuming at least 30% of the total covers mobile purchases and transactions. DLC & MTX on consoles & PC could take 10-20%. The big question is what is the ratio for items that can be procured in both physical and digital formats.

With Sony having a PSN sale almost every day of the year, then digital sales will be higher.

I'd like to see new game digital against new game disk.

Id imagine you all have a solid interwebs infrastructure in Great Britain? Even with a good connection in the states i am not at a 50/50 split for my purchases yet

I assume that 'digital' sales account for EVERY Digital purchase - so includes DLC, MTX, Digital only games - inc those on Mobiles/tablets/PC etc and yet the much more limited (just those AAA games) Physical sales account for half of UK's expenditure.

To me that say that Physical sales of those games are released via both formats significantly sell more on Disc than those bought to download. I doubt Digital will have a major impact on the charts - maybe games like Destiny, Division, Anthem etc may have a longer lasting impact in the charts as these are more likely to be bought digitally than a game like GoW which is not reliant on online connectivity.

Both formats can and should co-exist to offer gamers the choice. Some may well be more inclined to buy everything digitally for what ever reasons, but others obviously want Physical - there's 50% of UK gamers that do....

@Nyne11Tyme - in terms of average download speeds, the UK is 35th in the global league - the US is 20th. places like romania have twice the UK's average speed. it does vary a lot, in cities which have fiber-to-the-premiss, you can get 300mb/s. if you're out in the farmlands with the copper telephone line, you might get 300kb/s. and it can vary with ISP provider, monthly packages with data caps are still common.

Does that include Google play and crap like that though?

Lets hope sony do away with physical games for the next generation. The PC market works well without physical sales. It will also be less damaging to the environment. Sony is responsible for 100 millions of games cases and cd's made from plastic that just end up in landfill.

@leucocyte interesting. I would have thought the island (a big one lol) status would have helped with the infrastructure.

@kyleforrester87 - maybe, but if it is that quick, it will be more to do with a rapid decline in physical sales than rapid growth in digital, imo. the data released for 2018 shows that where games are available on both disc and digital, for the UK (it could be different elsewhere), it is roughly 75% on disc v digital, and that's for all platforms, so it's probably slightly higher for consoles (and that doesn't factor in the number of used games that are bought, which is about 15% of the value of new copies bought). for example, FIFA 19 sold 1.9m plastic discs, and just under 600k digital copies. that compares with 2.15m discs and 550k digital copies for FIFA 18. that's a quarter of a million drop in physical sales, but a less than 50k gain in digital ones - as a result, its % is up from 20% to 25%, but it is masking an obvious fact that AAA digital game sales are not making up for the falls in physical disc sales in the UK recently.

@Neolit good shout, really interesting article. I wonder how much free to play games like fortnite and apex legends have affected the budget end of the market.

Makes sense considering a lot of games can only be brought digitally.

"digital accounted for about 50 per cent of gaming software spending in 2018."

"Half of Video Game Software Bought in the UK Last Year was Digital"

The first does not mean the second.

A lot of physical media is discounted, sometimes heavily. I suspect physical is still outselling digital in unit terms, it's just the the high price of digital balances out the spending.

@JJ2 Yep. It's very likely manipulated.