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.
Would they actually lose those customers though? I prefer to buy physical whenever possible, but I still buy games that are only available digitally, or sometimes games that I just can’t get the physical copy of at a reasonable price. Sony’s banking on the expectation that people aren’t just going to stop buying games altogether in an all-digital future, they’ll buy digital once they no longer have a choice.