Talk of physical game sales has taken renewed interest in the wake of Sony’s announcement that it will be stopping production of discs starting on January 1st, 2028. While we’ve known for years now that digital sales have been outpacing physical ones by a decent margin, it seems physical Xbox sales have hit an all-time low. According to a recent report from analyst firm Circana, around 4% of all physical game sales this year have come from Xbox platforms. 4%!
Speaking with Kotaku, analyst Mat Piscatella revealed that roughly 63% of physical game sales in 2026 came from Nintendo platforms. PlayStation made up 32% of the pie, with Xbox coming in at an absolutely dire 4%. The remaining 1% is made up of PC collector’s editions, though there isn’t much data on which games are selling for the platform. It’s not surprising that Nintendo’s consoles would make up such a large share of physical sales, especially since Japan has more interest in the format, but even I’m stunned by the Xbox news. With such a low number, it’s really not surprising that one of the major console manufacturers would pull the plug on physical editions.
There’s a lot of speculation on why Xbox sales are so low, though most of it is probably down to Microsoft bringing its exclusive games to PC and PlayStation 5. The company has since reversed some of that decision, but people have simply moved on from the Xbox brand. It doesn’t help that from what we can tell, Xbox Series S has outsold the Series X three-to-one. With GameSpot reporting in 2023 that the Series S accounted for nearly 75% of platform sales, that means 3/4ths of the Xbox player base can’t even purchase physical copies. Maybe that percentage has changed a little over the last three years, but Microsoft doesn’t report console sales figures anymore.
Why are we, a Nintendo website, reporting on this? Mainly because it doesn’t paint a good picture for the future of physical copies. Nintendo noted in its latest quarterly fiscal report that nearly 38.5% of game sales were physical, so it doesn’t seem like the Nintendo Switch 2 will abandon physical games anytime soon. Still, that number is shrinking every year, and if both Microsoft and Sony excise the option completely, Nintendo will have more reason to follow suit in the coming years.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
