Sony
Here at Ars, we’ve been publicly musing about whether the world was ready for a disc-less gaming console since 2015. Now, though, the better question might be whether the world will ever need a new gaming console with a disc drive built in. Yesterday’s announcement of the PlayStation 5 Pro seemed to treat the existence of disc-based gaming as an afterthought. You had to be paying close attention during Mark Cerny’s “tech presentation” video to notice that the upcoming PS5 Pro is only available in a single, disc-drive-less model. And you’d have to read quite a bit into the official PlayStation blog post on the topic to find out that “PS5 Pro is available as a disc-less console, with the option to purchase the currently available PS5 disc drive separately.”
That $80 disc drive accessory was introduced as an optional upgrade to the PS5 Slim Digital Edition last year, alongside a Slim model that does They have a pre-installed disc drive. But now, just a year later, Sony has decided that it only requires a single “disc-less” model of the PS5 Pro as the default option.
Want your PS5 Slim (or PS5 Pro) Digital Edition to be able to play physical games? An $80 snap-on disc drive can help with that.
For Microsoft’s part, disc drives also appear to be making their way to consoles. The new Xbox models the company is releasing this holiday season include the first-ever “all-digital” edition of its high-end Xbox Series X, available for about $50 less than the standard edition. Microsoft is also introducing a new “Galaxy Black” Xbox Series X model with a disc drive this holiday season, but it will only be available “in limited quantities,” Microsoft said.
Things have changed a lot since 2013, when Microsoft privately considered a disc-less version of the Xbox One before scrapping the plans due to what Phil Spencer called “bandwidth and game size” concerns (the “all-digital” Xbox One S would ultimately limp along in 2019). Things have even changed considerably since 2020, when Gamestop's initial allocation of PS5 units skewed 3-to-1 toward the standard disc-drive-equipped model, per Ars' analysis.
An increasingly smaller minority
At the moment, it’s hard to read too much into the disc-less console trend. The original PS5 and Xbox Series X editions still exist with disc drives, of course. And for Sony’s part, that optional disc drive accessory exists as an important escape valve for any PS5 Pro customers who want to pay extra to enjoy games on discs.
But Sony’s statistics suggest that physical game discs no longer need to be treated as the default option. Digital downloads accounted for 70 percent of full-game PlayStation sales during fiscal year 2023 (ending March 2024), and nearly 80 percent of such sales during the April-June 2024 quarter. That’s up from downloads accounting for 53 percent of PlayStation game sales in fiscal year 2019, and up sharply from 19 percent in fiscal year 2015.
The number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital games increases exponentially.
The numbers are similar across the industry. For years now, most console games have not been released as physical products, a trend that now includes major games like Alan Wake 2Third-party publishers like Capcom report that 90 percent of their sales now come from purely digital games. In the UK, downloads accounted for 82 percent of sales of the most popular new console releases in June 2023.
Given trends and numbers like that, why would Sony or Microsoft think a pre-installed disc drive should be a relevant option for any gaming console going forward? Why would a console manufacturer assume a critical mass of consumers would want to spend an extra $50 or more on a disc drive they might never use?
Why not just cement a single, disc-less model as the default and relegate physical gaming to “needs the odd peripheral” status? The PS5 Pro’s disc-less launch suggests that Sony is now ready to treat disc-based gamers like VR fans, a tiny slice of the market that needs to invest in non-standard hardware to play games in its non-standard way.
It is long overdue
This doesn't mean that physical games are going away anytime soon. There is still a sizable minority of gamers who want to own their games in physical format for valid reasons, such as collectibility, accessibility, and long-term preservation. Large publishers and specialized companies like Limited Run Games will continue to serve this segment of the market for the foreseeable future.
This image, like game rentals as a whole, is now a relic of a bygone era.
When it comes to gaming hardware, though, the final push to move away from built-in disc drives in consoles as standard is long overdue. For PCs, Steam made buying a disc drive for your gaming rig seem like an anachronism years ago. In music, the iPod and streaming services have caused stores like Best Buy to stop selling physical CDs altogether (though vinyl sales are a small but growing niche). In the movie space, disc movie sales and rentals now account for just 3.6 percent of home movie spending, dwarfed by both digital sales and rentals (a combined 10 percent) and subscription streaming (86.3 percent).
Console gaming looks set to become the next media format where physical media no longer dominates the hardware market. Soon, the idea of a gaming console with a disc drive may seem as outdated as a laptop with a disc drive or an iPhone with a headphone jack.