Boxed Games are Now Only 5% of Market; Almost Ceased to Exist on PC
On PC, boxed editions of games are almost non-existent. This is according to a summary of the market in 2023, which was prepared by GamesIndustry.biz.
GamesIndustry.biz has published another edition of the summary of the year in numbers. As usual, the editors provided a comprehensive infographic with many statistics, collected by, among others, the analytics company Newzoo, which we have posted below.
This is what the gaming market looked like in 2023Source: gamesindustry.biz.
A year ago, the website pointed to a further decline in boxed game sales. Unhappily for fans of physical releases, the downward trend has not gone away in the last 12 months.
- In 2023, the results of boxed editions fell again and accounted for only 5% of games sold, generating $9.5 billion in revenue (10.7 billion in 2022). In comparison: digital games fared slightly better than a year ago, bringing in $174.5 billion in revenue for the industry. (up 0.8%).
- On PC, as much as 99% of revenue was generated by digital sales. The refuge of boxes remain the consoles, but even on them they had only a 17% share.
Overall, the game market performed similarly to a year ago, generating $184 billion in revenue (which GI.biz cites as an increase, although the infographic from a year ago shows $184.4 billion; perhaps the editors were referring to full-year figures, while both summaries were based on statistics through November).
As for individual games, the biggest winner was Hogwarts Legacy, which became the biggest bestseller in the UK (taking into account boxed sales only) and the US - while these are figures through November; if Avalanche Software's work can't be overtaken in December as well, it will break CoD's and Rockstar Games' 15-year hold on America. Also Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 found their way to both lists.
However, of these four titles, only two were among the ten most covered video games by the press. On top of that, the latest Zelda fell far behind Starfield and Diablo 4 in terms of number of publications. It will probably also surprise no one that the trailer of Grand Theft Auto 6 didn't give a chance to any other trailer in 2023.
