Driven by the giants of the industry, downloads and online services of video games now represent an overwhelming share of the sector’s turnover in France and around the world, to the point that game boxes could soon desert the shelves.
“The acceleration was still felt in 2023,” says James Rebours, president of the French Union of Leisure Software Publishers (Sell), to AFP. According to its annual report on the video game market in the country published on Wednesday, physical versions now only represent 16% of sales, compared to 31% in 2017.
Globally, they represent barely 5% of market revenues, according to figures provided to the British site Gamesindustry by the consultancy Newzoo, based in the Netherlands.
And even if we remove games on PC and telephone – sales of which are made almost exclusively via download platforms like Steam or the application stores of Google and Apple -, “dematerialized” still represents 65% of the games. money generated on consoles in France.
The new products are sold at the same price, around 70-80 euros [une centaine de dollars]whatever the format, “publishers make a significantly higher margin on digital copies”, explains to AFP Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, an American video game consulting agency.
The reason, according to him, is the manufacturing and distribution costs of the games, higher than the percentage charged by online sales platforms.
Another reason put forward by Simon Carless: the success of titles from modest studios, like Palworld, “which manage to reach a global audience thanks to platforms like Steam”.
“Standard” Xbox and Playstation, exception Nintendo
Big budget digital-only titles, “this will be the norm for most Xbox and Playstation games by 2028,” noted Mat Piscatella, sector analyst at the American Circana, on X in June.
With the arrival in 2020 of versions without physical reading media of the latest generation of consoles, the Xbox Series S and the PS5 digital, Microsoft and Sony have sent a strong signal about the place of digital sales in their strategies.
In January, Microsoft announced the layoff of 1,900 people in its “games” division in order to consolidate the acquisition of Activision. In a message posted on X, American journalist Jez Corden claimed that the IT giant had “closed the departments responsible for marketing Xbox games in physical points of sale. »
The company is now banking on online purchases to boost its business. Its Game Pass offer, which provides access to a large catalog of games on its platform, had 34 million subscribers in February, 36% more than the figure announced two years ago.
With one exception: Nintendo. In a financial report published in March, the Japanese manufacturer indicates that physical versions still represent almost half of its game sales between April and December 2023.
“Collectors”
“Our turnover was maintained thanks to Nintendo,” confirms to AFP Thomas Bachellerie, better known under the pseudonym Gyo on the networks. This former store manager in Lyon remembers a queue “like in the old days” in front of his store for the release of the latest Zelda in May. “It no longer exists for other consoles. »
Faced with competition from dematerialized stores, but also from online stores and supermarkets, the Frenchman ended his twelve years of activity in January.
“It’s the death of the physical game as we know it,” he regrets. Like vinyl for music, he believes that video games on physical media will become a “collectors” market.
Thus, the medieval-fantasy role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3, voted “game of the year” at the Game Awards in December and until then only available for download, will see a physical release in 2024 to respond in particular to fan demand .
Although he recognizes the “practical” side of not having to leave the house when buying online, Nassim, a 24-year-old Parisian player, also maintains a certain “distrust” towards digital versions: “We have already seen games being removed from the servers so I prefer to have them with me.”
“I kept my old games to introduce them to my son,” adds Damien, 50, a former gamer accompanying his 10-year-old son to a Parisian video game store. “With dematerialization, we risk losing this spirit of transmission.”