@ShadowRJ Unfortunately the data wasn't subdivided by region, just total global sales. I think it came from the original Sony end of year reports for investors, many of whom might be more interested in just overall figures. It would definitely be interesting to get the regional data.
I do know that for 2024 or 2025, one set of figures stated that North America was supposed to account for 37% of PlayStation total revenue, Europe for 34%, and Asia-Pacific for 19%. That isn't just games sales, but includes DLC, purchases of V-bucks, etc.
70 million physical PlayStation 5 games were sold in FY2025, 22% of all PlayStation game sales. Many PS5 games are not released physically (i.e. indies, or games like Mixtape, Dispatch, and ARC Raiders), or have limited print runs (i.e. Pragmata was famously difficult to get a hold of physically). Not saying this is all of it, but it makes the situation more complicated that it originally appears.
To get an idea of what 70 million physical game sales looked like compared to other consoles (i.e. to try and strip out the effect of counting the purchase of a $5 indie and $70 AAA game equally) I did the comparison versus PS1 to PS4 physical game sales for their sixth years on the market. That calculation of 70 million physical games comes to 34.5% (PS1), 31.11% (mainly PS2), 42.56% (mainly PS3) and 42% (PS4) of what was sold is terms of physical games for FY99, FY05, FY11 and FY18 respectively.
Some recent games, such as Astro Bot, sold better physically than digitally (at least in Europe). The physical vs digital game split very much depends on game type; single player games do far better in terms of physical sales. Did we really have that many big PS5 story games release so far this year? It's definitely an interesting issue, but we'd need more information before we could draw definitive conclusions from this data.
PlayStation leadership may want to maximise revenue per player, but don't seem to realise that the small-ish percentage of hardcore players who are early adapters and buy a disproportionately high amount of games (only 4% of players purchase more than one game per month, compared to 33% who purchase less than once a year and another 12% who buy a single game a year) really, really value physical media.
This is the same leadership who thought Concord would be a stunning success, amongst many other questionable decisions. We'll see how well the PS6 does if they don't backtrack.
Comments 4
Re: Sales Data Paints a Very Grim Picture for Physical PS5 Games in the USA
@ShadowRJ Unfortunately the data wasn't subdivided by region, just total global sales. I think it came from the original Sony end of year reports for investors, many of whom might be more interested in just overall figures. It would definitely be interesting to get the regional data.
I do know that for 2024 or 2025, one set of figures stated that North America was supposed to account for 37% of PlayStation total revenue, Europe for 34%, and Asia-Pacific for 19%. That isn't just games sales, but includes DLC, purchases of V-bucks, etc.
Re: Sales Data Paints a Very Grim Picture for Physical PS5 Games in the USA
70 million physical PlayStation 5 games were sold in FY2025, 22% of all PlayStation game sales. Many PS5 games are not released physically (i.e. indies, or games like Mixtape, Dispatch, and ARC Raiders), or have limited print runs (i.e. Pragmata was famously difficult to get a hold of physically). Not saying this is all of it, but it makes the situation more complicated that it originally appears.
To get an idea of what 70 million physical game sales looked like compared to other consoles (i.e. to try and strip out the effect of counting the purchase of a $5 indie and $70 AAA game equally) I did the comparison versus PS1 to PS4 physical game sales for their sixth years on the market. That calculation of 70 million physical games comes to 34.5% (PS1), 31.11% (mainly PS2), 42.56% (mainly PS3) and 42% (PS4) of what was sold is terms of physical games for FY99, FY05, FY11 and FY18 respectively.
Some recent games, such as Astro Bot, sold better physically than digitally (at least in Europe). The physical vs digital game split very much depends on game type; single player games do far better in terms of physical sales. Did we really have that many big PS5 story games release so far this year? It's definitely an interesting issue, but we'd need more information before we could draw definitive conclusions from this data.
Re: 'Sony Knows a $1,000 PS6 Won't Sell as Much': Analyst on Manufacturer's Plan to Maximise Revenue
PlayStation leadership may want to maximise revenue per player, but don't seem to realise that the small-ish percentage of hardcore players who are early adapters and buy a disproportionately high amount of games (only 4% of players purchase more than one game per month, compared to 33% who purchase less than once a year and another 12% who buy a single game a year) really, really value physical media.
This is the same leadership who thought Concord would be a stunning success, amongst many other questionable decisions. We'll see how well the PS6 does if they don't backtrack.
Re: 'They Wait for This Storm to Pass': No Chance of Sony Walking Back Its Decision to Kill Discs, Warns Analyst
Analysts have been making bad calls on the gaming industry for decades. They've been proclaiming either PC or consoles dead every couple of years.