Capcom Says All-Digital Future Won't Have a Significant Impact on Its Sales - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 06 August 2026 / 3,186 Views
Capcom in a Q&A session with investors following its latest earnings report said PlayStation no longer selling new physical discs on PlayStation consoles starting in January 2028 won't have a significant impact on its sales.
"Approximately 90 percent of our unit sales are digital," said Capcom. "We do not anticipate a significant impact at this time."
Capcom in the latest quarter sold 23.81 million games, which is up from 14.16 million units during the same period last year.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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Well if they dont produce the physical copies so we can actually buy them
Stop polluting the planet with your needless plastic and go digital.
You don't want us to own our games.
You never owned your games. Boot up a Mega drive and look what the text says even before the Sega Logo.
I think only777 is just flaming us.
You don't know what you're talking about.
False. I don't know what the law is elsewhere, but in my country physical copies are considered "sold, not licensed." U.S. federal law repeatedly uses the term "owner of a particular copy" to refer to an end-user who purchased a lawfully-made copy. Those game discs & cartridges, music albums (be they CDs, vinyl, or cassettes), VHS tapes, DVDs & Blu-rays, and print books sitting on one's shelves are one's property, both in fact and in law. I explained this in depth in a post on the forum earlier this year: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9647304
Again, that's just U.S. law, but I'm pretty sure in most countries if someone broke into your house and jacked your physical games, music albums, etc, that would be considered theft. Not from the IP holder. From you, because that's your stuff. Most countries do have concepts functionally identical to the first-sale doctrine, like "exhaustion of rights."
Are you actually being serious with these replies or just trolling? I cant tell
Sega can come get my Mega Drive cartridge. I am sure they could convince a judge that the game was only ever licensed to me.
Also, the Mega Drive boot screen never implied you do not own the physical game you bought.
https://segaretro.org/TradeMark_Security_System
You do realise that data centres have an utterly significant environmental impact, do you.
The amount of plastic waste that comes from video games is negligible. Even if you threw out every single physical game in the world, case and all, it would take up a small corner of a single landfill. They also represent a very small portion of plastic production. I explained this in-depth last November in this post: https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9624308
Driving a car produces orders of magnitude more pollution than whatever physical games you may buy over the course of your life.
Orders of magnitude?! Maybe my non-engineering friend, you need to study what a catalytic converter on a car does.
Because it sounds like you are just repeating the same nonsense as other people that don't understand car mechanics.
95% of all emissions to do with cars are all made within the construction of the car, not the car actually running on a road. Moving the materials around the world on boats is where the emissions are generated. More so with electric cars as a larger variety on materials from different corners of the earth are required.
According to a study from last November, the manufacture and sale of discs amounts to 312 tons of CO2 per million discs. That's 312 grams per disc. A survey from Circana from last year showed that about 52% of gamers buy one to four games per year on average. Roughly a third buy less than one game per year on average, while only 14% buy 12 or more games per year. On average, tie ratios were typically 8 to 12 games per system. So, over half of all U.S. gamers are responsible for somewhere around 0.3 to 1.25 kg of CO2 per year by buying physical. Or for the average console owner, if they buy all physical they're responsible for about 2.5 to 3.75 kg of CO2 per console generation. Even if we assume roughly 8 billion discs sold across five generations of PlayStation, four of Xbox, plus the Wii & Wii U. We're talking around 2.5M tonnes of CO2 over a 30-year period, or about 83,000 tonnes per year.
A Ram pickup truck, assuming 15,000 miles driven per year, produces eight short tons, or 7257.5 kg, of CO2 per year, the equivalent of transporting and manufacturing well over 23,000 discs. So, just one person driving a big pickup around releases roughly 2000 times as much CO2 as they'd contribute from buying four games a year. The transportation sector of the U.S. alone accounted for 1871M metric tons of CO2 just in 2025. So that's one country producing in one year nearly 750 times the entire amount of CO2 produced by the manufacture and transportation of every game disc ever made over the past 30 years. Now think about global CO2 emissions from passenger vehicles since the PS1 was released.
So yeah, my claim of "orders of magnitude" is absolutely correct.
"A Ram pickup truck"
We moved from normal car, to obscenely inefficient American truck real damn quick.
I'm not cherry-picking some unpopular vehicle. The Ram was the #5 best-selling vehicle in America last year. #1 was the Ford F-150 (9.2 tons of CO2 per 15k miles, so worse than the Ram). Most of the Top 20 was pickups and SUVs. The only sedan in the top ten was the Camry at #8, but even that emits 3.5 tons of CO2 per 15k miles. The only other sedans in the Top 20 were the Corolla at #11 (5 tons of CO2 per 15k miles), and the Civic at #12 (4.9 tons of CO2 per 15k miles). Even the small car-based "crossover" SUVs still emit a fair amount of CO2, like the RAV4 (#3 most popular vehicle; emits 4.2 tons of CO2 per 15k miles) and the CR-V (#4 most popular vehicle; emits 5.9 tons of CO2 per 15k miles). Looking to Europe, even their smaller, more efficient fleet doesn't fare much better. The Dacia Sandero emits 2.9 tons of CO2 per 15k miles.
So, that means even if you get a more efficient vehicle that's not an EV, you're still talking burning enough gas in two miles to equal the CO2 emissions associated with a single disc. Even if you drove only 10,000 miles a year in a vehicle that emits only 2 short tons of CO2 over that distance, you by yourself would still emit more CO2 in one year than what is produced from the manufacture and shipping of over 5700 discs. If you drove 15,000 miles per year over the past 30 years, even in an efficient vehicle you'll have emitted more CO2 from driving than the creation and transport of over 250,000 discs.
So no matter the vehicle, my "orders of magnitude" assessment still stands. I own about 560 discs combined across music CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and video game discs. I've accumulated that over a period of about 28 years. The environmental impact of my music, movie, and gaming purchases is minuscule compared to the environmental impact of just getting around town to drive to work or the grocery store over those same 28 years. Maybe if I bought every album, game, and movie in existence then I'd have made as big of an impact from those purchases as I would just from driving, but then I'd have one major storage problem at home to boot.
Also, forgot to mention that buying pre-owned copies falls under the "reuse" part of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," and a good chunk of my games are used copies.
How are my plastic games polluting the planet by sitting on my shelf in my home? XD
Capcom also counts Game-Key Cards as digital sales.
"There are three types of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
You can say things that are technically true, but don't tell the whole story. Video game companies might not say anything that's outright false in earnings reports, but through the use of technically-true statistics framed in a certain way are deliberately not being forthcoming about certain details about the size of the physical market. For example, Sony includes digital-only games when calculating their overall physical/digital split, but we know that as recently as 2023 most of their first-party games are majority physical.
Likewise, Capcom includes PC games, whatever games that don't even get physical releases, and even includes Switch 2 game key cards as digital sales. But what's the split for the PlayStation & Xbox versions of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata? What was the split last year for the PS & Xbox versions of Monster Hunter Wilds? Those details matter.
Yeah, I'm not surprised as Capcom has been leading the digital transition even though they still release every game on physical media as well. Last Fiscal Year ended with 93% of full games being digital, and they expect this current Fiscal Year (ending March 2027) to be over 95%. Those are full game % ratio's too, not like mixing DLC revenue with physical revenue.
That is crazy since Capcom still releases all their new games - Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata, Monster Hunter Wilds, upcoming Onimusha: Way of the Sword, etc - on discs and cartridges still, yet I guess it means the vast majority are picking them up in digital stores instead.
PC accounts for like 60% of their market, right? Helps results like these when there is no other option.
I get that but with the numbers, it really doesn't matter. Just assume Capcom did 10 million full game sales. Now, assume that 50% of those are PC, while the other 50% are console and split between PlayStation/Xbox/Switch. That's 5 million. Like you said, we know PC is all digital, there is no physical presence at all.
So all of physical sales - 7% of the 10 million - occurred in the 5 million console sales. That would be 700,000. That still only equals out to 14% of the ENTIRE console sales, and you can bet out of that 14%, probably at least half is just Switch because the the eShop/Digital sales there still isn't really that popular. Meaning you are looking at 7% or less of their entire PlayStation 5 / Xbox Series sales being on disc.
I'm not trying to defend Sony dropping physical cause it sucks, I'm just saying that for Capcom as a publisher, they could stop doing discs today and it would hardly affect them.
Right and isn't that also Sony's thinking? Not defending it either, as a collector of older games, it's nice to have the option and it's obvious that many games without disc preservation would have disappeared from knowledge long ago, many from the Amiga era already have.
Sony look at this and think, well if publishers prefer it, we only have 10-15% that are physical over all sales (even if big games are higher), after cutting costs of printing discs, packaging, shipping and the idea of PS6 drive meaning we can make it cheaper (AI will screw that up), then we are willing to lose those 10-15% to exchange for the money we gain from not doing those things.
PC publishers worked this out a while ago and it was done over time, PC players basically chose digital and in the end those that didn't had no choice. I guess this is Sony's problem, they announced it.
Baldur's Gate 3 released on PS5 as digital only (for like a year) and while some people wanted a disc copy and might have waited, most just didn't give a flying, they just bought it and played it. Those that wait are the customers Sony is willing to lose and quite frankly, I think publishers are too.
Exactly. Again, it sucks, but yeah you look at the numbers and then you think about how much further it will be tilted in digital's favor by January 2028 and it's like, for Sony, why bother. I'm sure there are some publishers out there who have a much bigger slice of their sales being physical, whether smaller games or bigger ones, that will be more affected by the switch.
One thing I thought about while reading your reply was sports games. Like for the big Madden and NBA fans out there, surely they are all buying physical copies right??? Like why buy digital when you are going to buy a new version again just 12 months later - wouldn't you want to trade-in your disc copy to GameStop for its 30 cents worth at least haha?
Statistics can be misleading. Pragmata and a few others were sold out physically right after launch. Also you have to remember that if a game is over 6 months old it won't be on store shelves anymore. And they count GKC purchases as digital so there's that too.
Capcom is actually one of the most generous companies with physical print runs of their games. I can go on Amazon and get a new sealed copy of almost any Capcom game that had a physical release on the PS4, PS5,, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, or Xbox Series X.
That's true. But it still makes a big difference when those very games aren't being stocked by local retailers. For reference, Saturn was only stocked at Babbages and Toys R' Us in the USA. Almost every mid-sized US city had one of those two stores. Saturn completely bombed in the USA but actually beat the N64 in Japan. Anyway, I would imagine, not being on actual store shelves lowers the physical sales of those Capcom titles by 10% of the total sales across physical and digital. So if a game sells a million copies lifetime between both physical and digital then 100,000 physical sales were lost due to not being on store shelves.
The Saturn bombing in the US had more to do with the fact that it was much more expensive than its competitors, and Americans by and large were more interested in games like Tekken, Super Mario 64, or FF7 than the likes of X-Men vs. SF, so the Saturn came off looking even worse in that regard. Wider retail availability wouldn't have saved the Saturn's bacon there.
Once upon a time, PC games were sold on store shelves in prominent display cases. I'm actually old enough to remember a store in the mall called Wizard's, which sold nothing but computers and computer software, and it was a huge store. Since my dad was retired military, we shopped at AAFES, and I spent all my time there either in the arcade or in the software section, where they did have console display cases in front, but most of the store was PC software. Then Steam happened, and PC games vanished from store shelves in less than five years. By that point, you were hard pressed to find laptops that still came with disc drives. PC gamers chose convenience, and people sounded the warning back then that convenience sometimes comes with a much higher price than what is on the sticker, and that price is being paid now. It's a chicken and egg thing. Does Capcom make so much from digital sales because it's harder to find physical games, or is it harder to find physical games because Capcom's customer base prefers digital distribution, so that's what Capcom focuses on? And I say this as someone who pre-ordered and bought the Resident Evil Generation Pack on Switch 2. I actually collected a lot of physical Switch games because to my 1980s-raised mind, a cartridge is a more collectible storage medium than a disc, even if it is a tiny cartridge like the Switch has. But here we are.
I still have a lot of my PC Retail Boxes even if I don't actually use the discs inside anymore lol. DOOM's and Quake's and Warcraft's, Half-Life 1 and 2 (Orange Box), and others. I've rebought all those titles digitally through Steam or Blizzard.net since those days to actually play them on modern hardware, but I can't bring myself to get rid of those awesome retail boxes :)
Your opening statement makes me think you haven't really had a hard look at Saturn's library. Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 were out on Saturn before Tekken and VF literally invented the 3D Fighting Genre. Shining in the Holy Ark was out before FF7 . Power Slave was out before Goldeneye. Nights into Dreams was out at almost the same month as Super Mario 64. The higher price was definitely a factor in Saturn's failure but actually being available in regular retail stores would have at least improved its NA sales total from 1.1 million to 6 million.
Steam launched in 2003. I was still buying physical PC games in 2009 so your 5-year timeline is misremembered.
The only choice is to not buy any games as digital is the only option in the majority of cases. Physical is either not available, delayed, or more expensive.
My question when i see these stats is, are they counting my buying say Resident Evil at release physically for $70 the same as me buying the same game for 50% or more off digitally on steam/psn during a sale as the same?
Because if so, the math just isnt mathing, and im stsrting to believe statements like these are PR cope and there will absolutely be a drop in profits once the all digital only ai driven dystopia is in full effect
Welp, there goes any hope of getting a physical Phoenix Wright Trilogy. FML.
