According to retail data, 35% of Marvel’s Wolverine sales were physical discs. This comes from Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), which tracks sales data across major markets globally.
The data suggests Wolverine shifted 2.16 million units in September (it went on sale September 15), and a significant portion of those sales were on-disc. In Europe, 51% of Wolverine sales came from the boxed version. Zooming in, more than two thirds were physical sales in France, but two thirds were digital in the UK.
Those numbers are probably inflated by customers “sticking it to Sony” because the purchases are done after Sony announced killing physical.
As for parting with a third (or more realistically a fifth like the former PS boss mentioned), that’s just a simple math question. Is the cost of keeping factories running, studios creating “masters”, keeping the supply chain active, factoring in the retail margin and maybe some other cost factors I don’t remember off the bat. Is all of that worth keeping 20% of the customers around? The profit margin, compared to selling digital directly, is probably non-existent.
A console business largely lives and dies by how many customers it has in the first place, so cutting out double digit percentages of them sounds like a hell of a bad idea to me. As an anecdote, I’ve got friends who buy plenty of digital games on consoles because there is no physical option, but when physical is an option, they do so. That sounds like you could easily convince them to just buy everything on digital then, right? Well, maybe not. If physical is never an option, they’d wonder why they bother with a console in the first place, since they can’t save money on used copies (either selling a new copy and recouping some cost or buying used at a discount) ever. At that point, why not just play on PC where the online is free and the discounts are better? With no disc drive, they lose most of their reason for playing on console at all.
Anyway, it looks stupid to me to cut out the physical market in the 2020s, and I haven’t even bought a physical game for 4 years.