During the Q&A summary of its 45th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders, Japanese developer Capcom shared its perspective on physical game production versus digital sales. Especially as the company sees a larger portion of sales going to digital titles.
“Given that a significant number of end users demand physical games, we do not expect to eliminate physical products.”indicates the official company report.
While Capcom releases all of its major titles in both physical and digital formats, the company has released a few smaller titles in digital format only. This month, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess was released as a digital-only title. During fiscal year 2023, Capcom announced that 90.1% of its sales were from digital titles, which it forecasts will reach over 93% during the current fiscal year..
| Fiscal year | Physical sales | Digital sales |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 19.4% | 80.6% |
| 2020 | 23.1% | 76.9% |
| 2021 | 24.5% | 75.5% |
| 2022 | 10.6% | 89.4% |
| 2023 | 9.9% | 90.1% |
| 2024 (estimated) | 6.8% | 93.2% |
Digital sales make up the majority of the video game market, with the percentage of gamers opting for digital titles increasing each year. In the UK, physical software sales continued to fall last year, down 5% year-on-year. Meanwhile, digital console game sales, digital PC game sales and mobile game sales all saw increases.
