Only 10% of the titles that reach the market can be purchased in physical format.
We have been seeing for a long time how the market has been embracing the digital format compared to a traditional distribution that has experienced a great decline. 2020 was a great year for the video game market, but it was especially good for the digital market. The global health crisis, the new consoles focused on digital, in addition to the success of services such as Xbox Game Pass, are serving to users increasingly consume more games in digital formatsomething that has not gone unnoticed by publishers.
90% of games are distributed exclusively in digital formata recent report of Ars Technica has served to shed light on the evolution that the market is experiencing in terms of physical and digital distribution and how the business model of companies is changing. The study covers the market evolution from 2018 to 2021 and the data is resounding. Beyond the evident increase in consumption in digital format, there is a significant reduction in the number of games distributed in physical format.
The bulk of the physical distribution falls on the big publishersLooking at the number of titles released in the United States, the gross amount of new games available in physical format has passed from 321 in 2018 to only 226 in 2021, a reduction of almost 30 percent compared to very different data in terms of the digital format, which went from receiving about 1,400 games from 2018 to 2020, to skyrocket in 2021 with the launch of 2,182 new games, representing an increase of 64 percent compared to 2020.
The percentage of games receiving a digital-only release has also increased, reaching almost 90%. This means that barely 10% of the games that reach the market do so in physical formatcompared to 23% that we received in 2018. A trend that does not evolve in the same way on all platforms.
The trend is uneven on each platform
Meanwhile in PlayStationthe number of new releases in physical format decreased more than 38% from 2018 to 2021, in Xbox fell 31%. Nintendo Switch is the one that has suffered the least that fall, decreasing only 7% during this same period. As you can imagine, the percentage of games distributed in physical format is concentrated in the big publishers, while smaller companies have barely published 8% of their new releases in physical format.
Among the concerns regarding market trend changeone of the most recurrent has to do with the future of stores and management of old games. Just this week we talked about some of the games that will disappear from the Wii U and 3DS eShop, including titles that will no longer be accessible on any other system or format.
More about: Videogames.