Sales Report shows 92% of PC Games were sold digitally in 2013

PC Gaming has been moving towards a no more boxes scenario for quite a while now, but a rather eye-opening statistic was recently released: in 2013, 92% of all PC game sales were made digitally. That means if a game sold 1 million copies overall, only a measly 80,000 of those were sold as a physical product (with the box, CD, manual, etc). Of course that is an average, and 80,000 is still a considerable amount of copies, but not all games sell a million copies.

Over the past few years, Steam has become increasingly more popular, and not to mention incredibly convenient for those who don't want to make a trip to GameStop when they don't have to. If the percentage rises above 92% this year, it's likely that we won't see physical boxes for even more PC games in the future. There are plenty of PC-only games being released with no physical copy even available, but for the most part, the big name games and multi-platform titles have physical copies. 

Possibly the biggest contributing factor to this, is the frequent digital sales of games, especially on Steam. There are new sales popping up daily, where you can get games for as much as 90% off. It is simply easier for developers to do this on a digital platform, and that causes a chain reaction which results in much less physical copies of games being purchased. I suppose it isn't necessarily a bad thing, since it probably is better for the environment, and encourages gamers to support developers since they can get games at reduced prices. 

Still, it will be a sad day when physical copies finally become obsolete, and we'll only have our collections to look back on. I can't imagine this will ever be the case with console games, but since you're required to install the games to your hard drive now, it could become a possibility. The thing with consoles, is that the big titles almost never go on a digital only sale, and there aren't really enough other games to induce this phenomena... yet.