United Kingdom’s leading supermarket, Tesco, has announced that it will no longer be stocking physical games due to a shift to digital downloads. This move is in stark contrast to Tesco’s stance on game discs eight years ago, when it said that smaller games would benefit from disc releases because of a solid market for physical games.
The shift from physical to digital games has accelerated in recent years
As reported by Gamesindustry.biz, Tesco has no plans to restock shelves with game discs once its current inventory runs out. The supermarket giant said that its customers now prefer digital entertainment.
According to data shared by Gamesindustry, less than 18% of U.K. sales for games released in June 2023 were physical. The development at Tesco follows the closure of GameStop‘s business in Ireland. The U.S. game retailer closed all of its 35 stores in the country.
GAME — once U.K.’s biggest video game retailer — told Gamesindustry back in June that the pandemic helped accelerate the growth of digital downloads, and despite the return to normalcy, physical sales are on the decline.
“You can see from market data that online is 75% of the market,” GAME executive Nick Arran revealed. “Before the pandemic, it was 45%.”
