US physical game sales hit new low as dev hits out at fans over digital protests

The newest Resident Evil is no doubt one of those as it’s the US’ best-selling game of the year so far (Capcom)

US sales data highlights precisely why Sony is going through with ditching physical games, despite continued complaints and criticism across social media.

The fervour surrounding Sony’s decision to stop releasing physical PlayStation games after 2027 refuses to die down, as people are still bombarding every PlayStation social media post and YouTube video with angry comments.

It’s no surprise, really, as Sony’s digital-only future is an awful one, where no one really owns their digital games and Sony’s refund policy for digital PlayStation games remains extremely limited.

Unfortunately, Sony and the rest of the games industry has plenty of reasons to phase out physical releases. This has been apparent for years now, with recent sales data revealing that, at least in the US, only seven games sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the last 12 months.

The data comes from Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, who shared the stats on Bluesky, in response to how a new cinematic trailer for the PlayStation 5 Wolverine game is inundated with complaints about Sony’s physical game plans.

Piscatella doesn’t name any of the seven games, but you can reasonably guess some of them based on Circana’s sales data on the best-selling games of 2026 so far, which accounts for both retail and digital sales.

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The best-selling US video games of 2026

1. Resident Evil Requiem
2. Crimson Desert
3. MLB: The Show 26
4. 007 First Light
5. Forza Horizon 6
6. Pokémon Pokopia
7. Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight
8. Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream
9. WWE 2K26
10. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7

Additionally, during the week ending July 11, only two PlayStation games sold more than 10,000 physical copies. If those are the kinds of figures Sony’s seeing, it’s no wonder it’s decided it can save some money by giving up printing discs.

Although this data is only for the US there’s no suggestion that things are drastically different in Europe or Japan.

There’s also the fact that there are less places to buy physical games from nowadays. UK chain GAME was the last real stronghold in the UK and that’s since gone into administration, and while CeX is still about, people primarily go there for older second-hand games.

It’s an unfortunate ouroboros where physical games retailers have died out because less people were buying physical games, which in turn meant people have had less options for purchasing physical games, which led to physical game sales dwindling even further.

Physical game enthusiasts will continue to resist for as long as possible – a petition demanding Sony U-turn on the matter recently crossed the 334,000 signatures mark – but it’s a fight they lost years ago.

Chet Faliszek, a video game writer who worked at Valve on the likes of Half-Life 2 and the two Portal games, made this point in a recent YouTube video, saying that if consumers really wanted to support physical media, they never should have bought digital games at all.

‘You, the consumer, have made a choice, and your choice is for digital,’ argued Faliszek, highlighting how Sony’s own fiscal report shows that 85% of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 game sales from the last quarter of the fiscal year were digital.

‘They’re reacting to your purchases. They had a system set up and you said, ‘No, we don’t like this. What we like is buying it digital. We want it instantly. We want to be able to download and play it right away.’’

GAME justified becoming more of a general toy shop because fewer people were buying physical games though it didn’t help in the long run (John Keeble/Getty Images)

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