Nintendo's Physical Sales Are Holding Steady, Even With Sony Walking Away From Discs
While Sony packs away its disc drive for good, Nintendo just showed the industry that physical games still carry real weight.
The Split, By the Numbers
Nintendo's latest financial results put 61.5% of its sales between March 30 and June 30, 2026 on the digital side, which works out to physical holding onto roughly 38.5%, a bigger chunk than I expected given how long the digital-takeover talk has been going around. Digital revenue for the quarter came in at 132.7 billion yen, up 90% from the same quarter last year, with the digital share itself creeping up about 2.2% over that same stretch.
It's worth knowing what's actually folded into that number before you read too much into it, since Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions, download-only titles, and DLC, including the upgrade packs for Switch 2 Edition games, all count toward the digital side, while anything bundled with hardware, like the Mario Kart World Switch 2 launch bundle, gets filed separately as a hardware sale and skips this split entirely.
What This Looks Like Next to Sony
Sony has confirmed it's ending physical disc production for new PS5 games in 2028, and GTA 6's only physical release will be a code-in-box version with no disc inside at all, though publishers don't seem to agree on how big a deal that is. Capcom, whose unit sales already sit around 90% digital, said it isn't worried about the physical market shrinking further, while smaller publishers like Astrolabe Games and Serenity Forge have leaned the other way, treating physical releases as a way to reach audiences that digital storefronts miss.
That split shows up on PlayStation's side too, where analyst Mat Piscatella has pointed out that only seven PS5 games have sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US so far this year, which says a lot about how differently physical is holding up depending on which platform you're looking at.
A Few Reasons to Keep a Foot in Both Camps
There are some pretty practical reasons physical still earns its keep, starting with resale and collector value holding up better than on most other platforms since Nintendo rarely drops its prices, plus a cartridge skips the endless install-and-uninstall shuffle that comes with limited hardware storage. It's also sometimes the only way back in once a storefront closes its doors, something 3DS owners already know firsthand, and PlayStation's own store has flirted with that fate too, backing off once before actually going through with a shutdown this time.
My backlog's a mix of both formats these days, and honestly, that's fine by me.
Discovery Still Gets Mixed Reviews
The eShop's gotten quite a bit faster lately, thanks to a performance update that rolled out on Switch 2 first and got backported to the original Switch not long after, cutting down a lot of the slowdown people used to complain about. Searching for a title you already know works fine for most people, but browsing without a plan still draws more mixed reactions, and that gap's probably part of why physical shelves and word of mouth still carry weight even this deep into the digital era.
So if you've still got a shelf of Switch cartridges collecting dust next to a library of digital downloads, this is probably a good excuse to stop feeling weird about it.
