Since the arrival of video games in the 1980s, we have all had the joy of knowing physical games, with cardboard boxes, cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, then plastic boxes with our HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays and above all, sometimes generous content with booklets and other stickers, becoming real gems for collectors.
Unfortunately, in recent years, physical games have become more and more basic, with the bare minimum in terms of content. With the mass arrival of subscription plans and "all digital", the physical games market has collapsed year after year in favor of digital games sold on the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Store or the Nintendo eShop. And the year 2024 is no exception, unfortunately.
The market Physical games collapse in the UK
Europe is a very important territory for the video game industry and a trendsetter. At the top, the United Kingdom, which often serves as a reference. So, the figures for 2024 are very worrying. We learn from VGC that physical game sales have decreased by 35% over the whole year compared to 2023. The revenue generated by physical games thus falls to £324 million (or approximately €388.4 million).
For its part, the digital games market is also experiencing a drop of only 1%. Although we expect With a historic 2025 coming with the launch of Nintendo's next console and the hopefully arrival of Grand Theft Auto VI, it's quite worrying to see how much market share physical games is melting year after year.
We learn that the entire video game industry and sales have seen a decline in 2024 with:
- -5% on PC download sales
- -15% on console download sales
- -2.6% on mobile download sales
- -12% on subscription revenue (Game Pass, PS Plus etc...)
Despite This, Kim Barley, the director of the Entertainment Retailers Association, believes that despite the decline, these data are not negative for the video game industry. After the dizzying growth that the industry has experienced with Covid, it is normal for the numbers to drop. However, video games are still the world's leading industry and are likely to experience a nice boom from 2025. We hope that this will affect physical games as well.
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