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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Adobe says shoppers arriving from AI chatbots were more likely to convert into sales for online retailers during Prime Day. (BigStock Photo)
U.S. shoppers spent a record $26.4 billion across all retail sites during Amazonβs four-day Prime Day event, and for the first time, the people most likely to complete a purchase were those who arrived from AI chatbots.
Itβs the latest twist in a high-stakes bet by Amazon. The AI assistants now sending retailers their best-converting customers are the same ones Amazon has worked to keep away from its own store, hoping to keep shoppers coming directly to Amazon.com and using its own on-site AI assistant instead.
Adobe reported over that weekend that visitors who clicked through to shopping sites from AI assistants were 40% more likely to make a purchase during the four-day event than those showing up through search, email or social media.
AI still accounts for a small fraction of total shopping traffic, but a trend is starting to emerge. In the past, shoppers sent by AI were the least likely to buy, according to Adobeβs data. The change suggests that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others are becoming more effective at giving shoppers the information they need to buy with confidence.
Those figures span all of U.S. retail β βPrime Dayβ has become much more than a day, and much bigger than Amazon alone. The distinction matters, because Amazon has taken a different path than many of its rivals. While Walmart, Target and others have opened their catalogs to outside AI assistants, Amazon has kept them out.
Agentic AI drives less than 1% of traffic across every major online store, but Amazonβs share is the lowest of the group, at about 0.4%, according to J.P. Morgan data.
Thatβs by design: Amazon sued Perplexity, for example, over its browser that shopped on customersβ behalf, and won a preliminary injunction barring the tool from the logged-in parts of its site, arguing that unauthorized shopping agents degrade a trusted experience. Perplexity is appealing.
Amazon has separately blocked ChatGPTβs crawlers from reading its listings β even as it has begun buying ads inside ChatGPT to bring shoppers back, a move first spotted by Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas KaziukΔnas and reported by Business Insider and Modern Retail.
On Amazonβs most recent earnings call, in April, CEO Andy Jassy said the company was in talks with the AI companies to come up with a better experience between Amazon and third-party agents to βfind something that works for customers and all the companies.β
In the meantime, Amazon is focusing on its own AI assistant.
The tool β launched as Rufus and folded in May into a service called Alexa for Shopping β has drawn more than 250 million users, with monthly users up more than 115% over the past year, the company said. Customers who use it while shopping are more than 60% more likely to buy, and Amazon Web Services has said the tool drove nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year.
Jassy said on the earnings call that third-party agents werenβt good enough yet β that they lacked a shopperβs history and often couldnβt get prices right β and that people would gravitate to whichever assistant knew them best. Thatβs the opening Amazon is going after with its own AI chatbot and related tools on Amazon.com.
βWe are aiming to have it be the best shopping assistant anywhere,β Jassy said.
The strategy reflects one of the ways Amazon is increasingly making money. Advertising is now among its most profitable businesses. J.P. Morgan expects it to bring in about $83 billion in revenue this year and, because the margins are high, to account for roughly a third of the companyβs operating income.
That advertising revenue depends on Amazon getting shoppers to browse its own site rather than handing the decision to an outside chatbot it doesnβt control.
The big question long-term is whether Amazon can maintain its own role as a primary destination for shoppers and avoid becoming just another selection on a chatbotβs shelf.
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