There’s been more about Sony ending Blu Ray production. They say they are not reversing their decision and the market determined it. We seen some numbers we want to discuss.

In their latest report, Sony says physical media is about 2 or 3% of the money PlayStation makes. That’s true, but there’s more to this and a lot of people have missed the point. Some are making the point 18% of all PS5s are digital. The point isn’t relevant when you don’t use them.

The bigger issue that both sides aren’t talking about is first party. When you read earlier reports your seeing digital beating physical, but Sony never gives us first party sales. The leak of sales data from Insomniac said something different. It showed most of their first party is still mostly sold physical. This was for games in 2020-2022, when they were also saying digital games are bigger than physical. 

Gaming analysts talked about it saying the digital shift is happening, but it’s slow for Sony. The leak showed most Sony first party sales were 37-43% digital. The highest one was MLB The Show at 61%, but that’s normal for games that come out annually. In their report for those years (2021-2022), Sony says basically 70% of sales are digital. For 2024 and 2025 you had 76% and 78% of sales were digital. If they’ve gone up only 6-10%, that would mean that the split is around half with physical being ahead in some games.

In the second chart of the earnings report, they tell you how many games have been sold. They also tell you the first party sales, but then things change. For Full game software digital download ratio (PlayStation 4 PlayStation 5)”, they appear to combine both 1st and 3rd party digital sales ratios, but don’t give us a separate ratio for both like they did above.

People have been using the last few earnings reports to show that physical is a small part of their business and it makes sense. They also said the Insomniac leak is out of date. When you look at what the leak is covering, even then Sony was saying almost 70% were digital.

Earlier we said that if digital sales had gone up by their numbers, it would basically be an even split for most games. But we intentionally assumed that was for just the 1st party. With a combined percentage, you can have just third party to increase like it has for the number to grow. You can also release less games and since third party sells mostly digital, the number would go up.

Sony has cancelled many games and it has led to low first party releases. If you are majority of your physical sales and you slow down releases, your numbers are going to be lower. The last Sony first party we know that sold more physical than digital was Astro Bot with 55% physical. Even though they’ve slowed releases, the money brought in from 2021 to 2025 has been around the same for physical. The exception was a 50% increase in 2022, when you had Horizon, God of War and Gran Turismo come out with the Death Stranding and Uncharted rereleases, which all sold mostly physical.

Another thing that looks strange on their reports is how they’re reporting. On the newest report the physical number looks really small compared to the earlier one. The earlier ones were reported in millions of yen, while the latest one is in billions. The same gaming analysts that talked about the leaked numbers are now saying only a few games this year have sold more than 100,000 copies. When people asked about total numbers, he then said it’s no more than 275,000. He also made sure to say that was in the US.

I think Sony got tired of waiting for their first party to be like other companies. After all the service games having development issues and losing money, they had to make stuff look good for investors. As we felt GTA 6 was a test to see if all digital was possible for PS. When they saw the numbers, they knew gamers would complain but still buy. That’s why they’re not worried about the protests.