Nintendo Won’t Ditch Physical Games Soon, Despite PlayStation’s 2028 Shift

PlayStation has confirmed that its future plans won’t include physical releases starting in 2028, and Xbox has been quietly easing off the format as well. Nintendo, meanwhile, continues to look like it’s charting its own course—one that, for the foreseeable future, almost certainly does not involve walking away from physical games.

There’s a fair amount of signal suggesting Nintendo isn’t preparing to drop discs and cartridges anytime soon. For one thing, its most recent system is only about a year old, and that hardware includes support for physical software. It also appears increasingly likely that Project Helix and the next PlayStation generation won’t follow the same path.

Almost Half Of Nintendo’s Sales Are Still Physical

Even more telling is how many players are still choosing boxed Nintendo games. Nintendo’s latest financial reporting shows that sales remain meaningfully split: during FY2026, 54.6 percent of Nintendo’s software moved digitally. That still puts more than half of sales in the digital column, but it’s much closer to a straight 50/50 divide than what PlayStation and Xbox are currently seeing.

Recent PlayStation figures point to a far heavier tilt toward digital, with roughly four-fifths of its game sales coming through downloads.

When you’ve got that many customers still buying physical, a major shift like the one PlayStation announced is a recipe for backlash. If Nintendo were to make a comparable announcement, it would likely frustrate—and potentially push away—an even larger portion of its audience. In other words, if the online anger seen over the last day is any guide, swapping PlayStation for Nintendo could double the number of upset players at a conservative estimate.

There’s also a practical angle: you might assume Nintendo would be the first major platform holder to abandon physical releases purely from production costs. One estimate puts manufacturing a physical PS5 game at around $6.50. By contrast, a Switch physical release is reportedly closer to double that, roughly $12 to $15, and physical costs for Switch 2 titles are said to be even higher.

Nintendo Is Rethinking Physical Without Dropping It

Nintendo has already shown how it intends to handle the future of physical gaming, and it isn’t by abandoning the format. Instead, it has moved to increase the price of physical editions for its first-party releases. Many now carry a $10 premium compared to the digital MSRP. It has also introduced game-key cards during the Switch 2 era, a decision that has been controversial—but it may now look less harmful than the alternative as players on competing platforms brace for a world of purchase codes showing up in retail boxes.

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Game-key cards aren’t a perfect solution. They function as keys—hence the name—that kick off a download once inserted into the Switch 2. Still, that approach seems preferable to buying an empty package containing nothing but a card. If PlayStation had offered something similar—where a disc would trigger a download and effectively lead to an increasingly digital future—there likely would have been an uproar. It just wouldn’t have matched the scale of the reaction being felt right now.

Nintendo’s strategy may not have been popular at first, but the end result is that it’s once again coming out looking better than PlayStation and Xbox in this specific debate. Part of that is because Nintendo still has a large base of players who actively want physical options. But it’s also because Nintendo has been doing things its own way for two decades—building processes and expectations around its audience rather than trying to “improve” on what rivals are already doing. How it’s approached the physical-versus-digital split is the latest example of that mindset.