Many gamers have been lamenting Sony's recently announced decision to halt sales of physical game discs in 2028. However, new data revealed by Circana analyst Mat Piscatella highlights how years of stark economic trends helped lead Sony to that decision.

In a social media thread Thursday morning, Piscatella shared insights into Circana's tracking data on physical game sales in the US dating back to 2003. A graph of those trends shows physical sales peaking in the 12 months ending June 2009, when 297 million units were sold across the US. Those physical unit sales have been on a steady downward trajectory since then, leading to just 37 million physical units selling in the US in the last 12 months.

The newly revealed data follows on an earlier post from Piscatella highlighting that only seven PlayStation games had sold over 100,000 physical units so far in 2026. Today, Piscatella followed up on that stat with a graph showing how this baseline used to be common; 100 PlayStation games sold at least 100,000 physical units in 2008. The ceiling for physical PlayStation game sales isn't all that impressive these days either; Piscatella shared that the top-selling physical PlayStation game has only sold a paltry 275,000 units in the US so far this year.

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Since Sony announced that it was planning to stop producing physical PlayStation discs in 2028, many people have been justifiably worried about how they will maintain ownership and long-term game access in a disc-free world. But halting production of PlayStation discs also means eliminating the market for cheap used PlayStation discs, which are often available for well below the price of a digital download.

How much is this disc-based discount worth? To find out, Ars analyzed how the prices of 19 current top-selling PlayStation games varied between digital downloads and physical discs (both new and used). We found that, while used discs are the cheapest option for most games for most of the year, the frequent and periodic deep discounts offered on the PlayStation Store often undercut the cheapest game disc options. That state of affairs will likely persist even in a future without PlayStation discs.

Our prices are so low, you'll think we've suffered brain damage

For our analysis, we started with Sony's list of the bestsellers on the PlayStation Store. We eliminated any games that weren't available on a physical disc, then used the database over at PlatPrices.com to determine both the "Standard" price and the lowest "Discount" price offered for those games on the PlayStation Store in the last year (as well as the total number of days the discount price was offered).

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