Capcom Says It Won't Give Up on Physical Games, Despite Utter Domination of Digital Sales

I'm slightly disappointed this article isn't just a big old Rickroll.

I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It’s the threat if not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it’s threatening the game.

Just code for they wont be the first to do that. They’ll wait for the pressure of doing so to drop

@BeerIsAwesome I can see the PS6 being digital only, with the option of a disc drive add-on. That will reduce physical sales even more, to the point where they'll argue digital only is the way to go. But I could be wrong!

Common Capcom W, I try and buy physical as much as I can!

Even though I am a digital-only gamer, this is good news. I think both digital and physical games should both pre-exist, as I think digital has some pretty significant flaws, like not actually being able to permanently own games and only really buying a license for them. If I am being honest, a digital-only future sounds a bit scary.

• Phase 1: No more physical media, only digital media exists
• Phase 2: No more purchasable digital media, only subscription based services exist
• Phase 3: LOTR Gollum gets a remake and due to servers being overrun by download requests, physical media returns once again

I only buy physical for one-playthrough single player console games. Otherwise, I've about 400 digital titles across my Steam, Playstation and Nintendo accounts.

Started with Steam over ten years ago for obvious reasons, then six months into the Switch's life I realised that digital was best for a portable console. By the point of the PS5 release it just felt logical I'd go down that route with it, too.

I'm as deep down the digital collection rabbit hole as the person with a wall of hundreds of physical games is that one. Time will tell whether it was a really stupid mistake, or whether it ultimately won't really matter.

This is something to be applauded.
Physical and digital copies all available. You can choose whichever you want.

@Czar_Khastik No need for optional manky hair physics on the PS7!

@Czar_Khastik
In that kind of future there's one rule that applies to it all:
If downloading it isn't ownership, then piracy isn't stealing.

With the way Sony's going they can shove the PS6 up their bums, but if they go all digital I'm done with them and I'll be done with buying anything in this clown world.

Ps. This already is the case with buying movies digitally through Sony's services. You'll find on page 20-something in their terms and conditions that you can lose the license to whatever you purchased. 🤡

@Specky We're actually seeing something similar with the legacy PS3/Vita PSN store. Here in Croatia we started using Euro as the new currency and Sony decided they don't want to bother with updating the currency in legacy stores for us so they just shut them down. I can still access my Download List, but that's about it. It's a matter of time when they shut down the store in other countries as well.

And if this licence thing applies to their movies, it could also mean people could lose licenses to their legacy games

Then I won't give up on you, Capcom. Don't ever change. xxx

N.i.c.e. thats why capcom is so legendary.i grew up with capcom video games.theyre arcades video games are some of the best in the 1980s and 190s up there with snk.konami.etc.physical media is still going to be there for a very long time.its old school.and a and childhood memo at the same time.word up son

as long as there's a choice

I buy a lot of digital, both with games and movies. It makes it easier to switch between titles.

For movies, the quality often suffers compared to disk, especially with UHD disks (less so for DVDs). So as long as consoles with drives also play movies, I'll be buying the console with a drive. But my wife just wants convenience, and she'll stream content rather than pull out a disk. I suspect most people are like that - and honestly, some of the streaming video content can be pretty darn good quality, if you've got the bandwidth for it.

I think the same is true of games. Since you can't just pull out a disk, put it in the console, and start playing any more - not until you wait to copy the content to the system (if there's anything to copy from the disk other than a key) AND download patches and upgrades - then the convenience between disk and digital for games is already 100% in favor of digital. With no quality difference between the two, digital makes even more sense for games than for movies.

STREAMING is another story. I think the disk-vs-digital battle is essentially over, with disk being a niche market from now on. The real battle now is whether streaming is good enough compared to playing it on your own hardware - and that has a chance to really change as higher-bandwidth, lower-latency internet continues to expand.

@Specky while I agree with the sentiment that digital ownership through licensing restricts traditional property rights… this is a false equivalency. The use of licensing for purchases is not the same thing that makes piracy illegal. I know piracy is popular among the gaming community but it is still theft. Licensing isn’t theft. It’s a trade off between traditional property rights and convenience which favors the creator.

That’s nice to know but why don’t MH Rise, Path of the Goddess and MH stories 2 have physical versions for PS yet

This is absolutely the last generation of physical media. Nintendo might have a physical cartridge in the Switch 2, but Xbox and PS will absolutely go digital only.

@Ambassador_Kong No one is betting that Xbox will still have physical media, they've been trying to get rid of it for years due to Game Pass. Ironically the tier change gives back a reason to make physical copies of games.

I don't see Sony or Nintendo dropping it just yet.

The reality is that digital figures are extremely skewed due to sales, longer exposure on storefronts (largely due to said sales) and DLC and games too niche for physical print runs. When you look at release period copies sold physical is still very popular. Xbox sections are dead of physical games, Sony and Nintendo sections are not.

"93% of its overall sales come from digital games"

Does that account for games with only digital purchase options? Those titles should not be included when we talk about comparing physical to digital sales numbers. Kunitsu-Gami is not the only digital exclusive title from Capcom.

When I read this story, I imagine it is 1960 and I open the newspaper to see "Ford has no plans to abandon production of carts for horses".

Been 100% digital for donkey's years. For the best part of the last 30 years I've been a PC gamer, and have been full-digital on that platform for over 20 years - longer than some of you have been alive.

This whole thing is a clown show.

People buy a useless plastic disc that has been shipped over the world with all the resulting environmental damage.

They stick it in their console, where it does sweet FA as they pretty much download the entire game anyway.

Then they have to keep swapping out these useless plastic discs every time they change games.

Sounds like something Mr Bean or Frank Spencer would come up with.

@IamJT
I have never pirated a game in my life. I used to do so with movies when I was a broke teenager though.
It definitely is theft, I agree.

But if we can use their logic that buying something is NOT ownership, as per page 20 terms and services, then pirating wouldn't be stealing. Period. Buying a movie would be more of a rent then. They can take it away anytime they want.

The lack of service also is a thing. You can slap on whatever kinda subtitles, edit them, put the file wherever you want, etc. You're free to do whatever.
Merely changing subtitles sizes on my blurays though... God almighty that is too much to ask for.
Who wants a future where these corpos can decide whatever you're allowed to do? We're already living it and it's gonna get worse when physical releases go

@CrashBandicoat
Ah yes, the classic BP oil argument where they absolutely destroy our world and wildlife to no extent and then spend millions to create a similar argument like:
"Your CARBON FOOTPRINT (BP made term) is the reason the world is dying. You should buy less physical games, so the world (and our pockets) can heal"

It's always the common folks fault, eh? Missing the point on how these corpos run the world is why we're in a dystopia right now. Not because of plastic straws

@CrashBandicoat Yeah let's all stay in our house while we are at it, eat crickets and download games from massive mainframes that use a continents worth or power. I'll stick with carts, discs and steaks thanks

@Specky Again, I am not arguing with the sentiment, but licenses have existed since before electricity existed and have always operated in the same way. You buy a ticket to a sporting event, it is a license to access the event until it ends, or until they tell you to leave. You ask a friend to use their pond to go fishing, you have a license to be on the property that the friend can then revoke.

It's actually very applicable to a software license if you follow the history of the law developing around contracts. In D.P. Tech. Corp. v. Sherwood Tool, Inc. in 1990 a court held that all software is a good, not a service. Goods contracts are highly preferential to corporations while service contracts are not. However, the law could not predict the developing nature of software and contracts in 1990 compared to how we understand them now. I would argue most software licenses are more of a service than a good, but a lot of IP lawyers would argue the opposite and for good reason. Realistically, its going to take another decade to balance out.

Regardless, buying something, either a good or a service, is not an ownership interest in that thing in a lot of situations. I do think there is room for "right to access" reform for when you purchase software in a license, but I also see a lot of issues that would cause with bad actors.

EDIT: Just to follow up as someone who has written, reviewed, edited, and wrote a whole 26-page article on Terms of Services, a huge amount of what is in those is just to protect the issuer of the terms from things the user has done to them and other corporations in the past, some of which is really heinous. You would not believe the crimes that have been committed on the PSN network.

The other thing that might be skewing the data is the fact that any second hand sale of a physical game copy does not register as an actual sale.

Every CeX, eBay, facebook marketplace etc sale of a pre-owned title potentially costs the developer money in lost sales. I’m sure publishers and developers would be absolutely fine with pushing physical copies if they could somehow guarantee that they wouldn’t be sold again whilst new copies of the game are still in circulation.

Just from a software sales perspective it’s actually in the interest of all developers and publishers to push digital. A digital sale is non transferable so therefore carries no risk of being resold and cutting the dev/publisher out of any resale revenue.

@CrashBandicoat And yet I can resell my physical version and recoup at least half, if not more, of the original purchase price. This is a major advantage of physical that often seems lost in the discourse.

Oh thank god! I love camping outside of the store at mightnight for games.
Or even better, ordering them by telephoning a number i got from a magazine and then waiting 3-5business days for a mailman to deliver the disk i have to then change everytime i want to play a different game.

Why would i just download a game in matter of minutes whenever i want?

Good news. I’ll only ever buy physical media for consoles. So it can last and be passed on easily to people in my family. My family has all of our consoles since my parents got into gaming.

@Stevemalkpus another advantage is when someone in the next generation of your family wants to play something you can. Assuming one has a working console. My nephews love to play PS3 and PS2 games. Which is no problem, my OG 60gb PS3 still works. I hang onto my consoles.

I salute Capcom stand for physical media but where in the hell Kunitsu-Gami physical release? :/

@Stevemalkpus This 🤝

And some physical games especially retro and collectors edition ended up has more value than the initial price. Rule of Rose for example, a sealed copy of this game can cost more than 900 bucks. Or a loose copy of Nintendo World Championships NES even can cost 22K bucks!
Digital games doesn't have this advantage at all.

Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are all pushing for a subscription based system if they can buy 2030 I reckon that will be the case

Will be a sad day.
Day 1 purchases i make are all physical. There is no chance i'll be paying 70+ euros for a digital game.
I only buy digital when they are 35 or less.

@Shepherd_Tallon define "woman."

The statistics of 93% buying digital is crazy to me. I buy most of the games I'm most excited for physically, although if its not on my "must buy" list I do sometimes buy on sale digitally or play through ps plus or game pass. But I'd always have a place in my heart (and on my shelves) for physical releases

@Nem this is it..if digital prices were £50 or less I'd adopt a digital collection but there is no way I'm shelling out £70+ when I can source the physical disc for a lot,lot cheaper via online suppliers. The prices for new day one games via the psn store are disgusting.

@CrashBandicoat yes because having giant data centres scattered around the world eating electricity is really good for the environment.

You've got on your high horse to dictate to people what they should do and then missed out the crucial detail that upends your entire point.

Additionally physical media can be sold or loaned to other people, which means that the environmental costs can be decreased per player, which isn't going to happen with digital downloads.

I do feel that the industry has been artificially lead towards an all digital future by hardware manufacturers and certain publishers.

However this will be my last physical game generation purely because I don't have the space anymore. So I'm also part of the problem.

Good, cause I want to get a physical copy of the MvC Fighting Collection. Anything with MvC2 on it basically prints money down the line.

@CrashBandicoat It’s called “actually owning your property instead of having an indefinite revocable-at-any-time license to use it.”

God help you if you ever lose your account somehow.

"Because we sell many games in Japan on Nintendo platforms, we will continue to sell boxed physical games in Japan on Nintendo platforms."

Fixed it.

@Specky I find it kind of funny that Sony is so well regarded when it comes to gaming media by anyone over a certain age. Anyone that was there in the US in the late 90's would forever associate Sony as the company that declared open warfare on the public through their control of MPAA and RIAA, their heavy handed behavior (including draconian legal and financial destruction of minors convicted of piracy to make examples of them), their wanton destruction of CD drives via their on-disc DRM that they knowingly knew could break the tracking motors (considering they designed and built the drives....). Their insane implementation of CSS on DVD standard and then the download licensing for BD... If one, and only one name were to come to mind as the embodiment of everything evil and unholy when it comes to draconian corporate overreach over media ownership and use rights, that name would be "Sony."

I can only assume that outside the US, 90's dwellers weren't aware of it all, and anyone too young to have been there is just clueless. Much as we all loved Playstation at the time, it was kind of because Playstation, then, operated like Xbox did, until recently - Semi-independent of the parent corp and their toxic pit of corruption.

I don't think that physical games are ridiculous, it's good to have options. I DO, however, think people who are dying to tell you how they ONLY use physical media because blah blah blah ARE ridiculous. Great, you don't value convenience. Not everybody does.

And the whole "what happens if you lose your accont..." all I can say is, if we are ever at a point where major infrastructure is falling apart to that level, I think my library of digital games will be pretty freaking far down on my list of immediate priorities.

@LowDefAl oh deary deary me........

Think McFly, think.

Firstly your disc causes massive amounts of pollution in it's production.

Secondly your disc causes massive amounts of pollution with the production of it's packaging.

Thirdly your disc causes massive amounts of pollution with its transportation.

and then Fourth.....

And then....

And then....

And then....

AND THEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Your disc often contains barely anything, or requires massive patching, so as soon as you shove it in the PS5, you download a patch that is barely smaller than the entire digital game!

I.e. you use the data centres too!

DOOOHHHH!!!!

You are double-dipping on the carbon and pollution!

I’m assuming all these people that value ownership over licensing own record players, cassette decks and cd players for their music and still buy their music albums on vinyl?

@CrashBandicoat you have your arguments for digital (which don't make much sense) and others have their own arguments for physical. To each their own.

Both digital and physical have their pros and cons. Don't try and shove your opinion down people's throats. Because that's all it is - your opinion - you have absolutely no facts to cover you on anything you've written.

Yup. Even if digital is dominant, enough people still buy physical games that it's short-sighted to abandon the physical release model entirely. Why alienate a large minority of your playerbase unnecessarily?

I don't care about physical, I'm just waiting for moment when all media becomes NFT based.

I can't believe we've got to a point where changing a disc is too much hassle for some people.

93% of game sales is digital holy ***** no wonder there rolling in the dough 😳

@Neither_scene vinyl has made a huge comeback 🤣

Being PC as lead platform, supporting VR, and now continuing to support console with physical releases. Yeah Capcom is definitely the best of the best when it comes to developers.

well, it's a nice gresture. but realistically, capcom has no say in the matter come next generation of consoles. if sony wants to pull out of physical media, it can and will.

i'm not going to let capcom off so easily, though. ever since resident evil 8 gold edition, they have NOT been including the DLC on the disc and instead opted for download codes. capcom really isn't into this idea of physical media as much as they will have us believe. a number of their games also did not get physical releases in the west (for playstation platforms), including various phoenix wright games, ghost trick etc, and would require an import from japan.

so, whatever... one thing i do agree with is the impact that physical collector's editions will have on the market, if they are suddenly stripped away. i have no doubt that is a lucritive revenue stream for many publishers. that being the case, sony is going to have to deal and negotiate with the publishers when it comes to its distribution methods for the ps6 because going digital-only could (in theory) break the industry in ways that we have yet to realize.

as some people have already pointed out, ps6 will likely only have one model, digital-only, with an option to buy an optical drive seperately in order to preserve backwards compatibility for ps4/ps5 physical releases. then, if we are lucky, sony will allow publishers to do a limited physical print run for ps6 games in various cases. i do not expect all publishers to do this (in order to save on costs), nor would i be surprised if physical releases are very limited, expensive and hard to obtain. the future of physical media looks bleak to be sure. people should collect physical games for ps5 as if it is the last of its kind because it very well could be.

We are slowly giving up ownership for accessibility. 😖

@Porco A gold edition or a complete edition with DLC code is useless why waste plastic if you won't include the full game on a disc.

@CrashBandicoat The LRG games has the patches on there. And things like Horizon on PS5 complete with patches on the disc.

Pollution yeah i really dont care that much about it. Do you have kids, go on holiday, have a (big)car, buy things with tofuu in their ingredients or palm-tree oil, guns? If you are from the US youre probably even a worse wasteful.

Good, because I still but physical whenever possible and I've actively avoided some games that don't have a physical release.

@Flaming_Kaiser my thoughts exactly. to make matters worse, some physical "complete" editions never got released in the west. take ps4 resident evil 4 (remake) gold edition as an example. it was only released in europe and japan... if i choose to import the game, i will not be able to obtain the dlc via code (due to it being region locked) unless i create/use a european or japanese account. so there are more nagatives to this beyond the content not being available on the disc itself. not sure why capcom often limits physical releases to particular territories if they truly believe in supporting physical media.

@IamJT
Definitely and you are very knowledgeable on this and probably right. It still does not justify anything. This just means their policies are utter garbag and by their logic of purchasing not being ownership, privacy wouldn't be theft.

The dystopian future is now lol:
https://youtu.be/RtTdOBCLsyo

@Specky IP law is my passion 🤣. I just told my brother the other day we got the most boring dystopian future... its not Mad Max where we are all fighting for our lives... its not Bladerunner where we have cool future tech... its just algorithms training everyone to think a certain way and no one owning anything or learning anything for themselves. Its just a world of targeted ads.

@Porco 1000% agreed put it on a disc or why bother with a complete edition its wasteful and even worse useless.