Sony wants to leave physical games behind in 2028. The most interesting part is this year’s numbers, which help explain the thinking behind it.

According to estimates published by the newsletter The Alinea Insight, new 2026 games sold in physical format have made more than $655 million in premium revenue on PlayStation. That is far below 20% of the total for the year’s releases. Digital-only titles and pre-order bonuses weigh a lot here, as they push buyers toward the online store.

The main reason is that a digital sale is worth more to Sony than a disc sale, which makes sense. With the physical format, the company gives up a cut to the store, pays for making and shipping the discs, and gives up the 30% it takes from every sale in its own store. On top of that, there is the used market, where copies are sold again and again and Sony sees none of that money.

Here is the uncomfortable part of all this. The ten 2026 games with the most physical copies sold add up to about $1.2 billion in disc revenue. Almost all of them are big single-player games, the kind of title the brand is known for.

Marvel’s Wolverine shows this well. Of its 2.6 million copies sold, about 800,000 were physical. That comes to about $64.6 million and 32.3% of its total revenue. Resident Evil Requiem is in a similar range, with 1.3 million physical copies and $92.3 million, which is 30.2% of what it has made on the platform.

The other big support for the format is Japan, where buying in stores is still very common. Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword are at around 44% of copies sold on disc, with 43.5% of revenue in both cases. The same pattern shows up in Silent Hill Townfall (41.3%), Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties (46.7%) and the Fatal Frame II remake (50.7%).

On the other end are sports games. In this genre, five titles are among the ten releases with the most revenue of the year on PlayStation. FC 27 leads that overall table with $727.9 million, and only 8.9% of it comes from the physical format. NBA 2K27 goes down to 4.6%. The reason is modes like Ultimate Team or MyTEAM, whose digital deluxe editions give early advantages and push players to buy straight from the store.

The numbers show why Sony’s plan makes money sense, but they also show the risk. Sports games already live almost fully on the digital store, so moving them over is easy. Getting the fans of Wolverine or Resident Evil to give up their discs may be much harder.