Grand Theft Auto 6 is the first major console game to release without a physical version. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick doesn’t think it’ll be the last. Physical games will hang around, but not in any mass-market sort of way. He says they’ll become closer to the equivalent of vinyl records in music.
“It may not be the end, but listen, we’ve been talking, you and I, for a long time,” he told The Game Business‘ Christopher Dring in a new interview. “I predicted that digital distribution would be well over 90 percent of the business more than 10 years ago. I don’t always get it right, but this one I got right. Will there always be some physical business? Yes, in the same way that there’s still a vinyl business in recorded music. But it’s going to be a very small part of the business.”
Physical music accounted for just over 10 percent of total music revenue in the first half of 2026, according to estimates by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That comes out to $581 million, roughly 80 percent of which was earned through sales of vinyl.
S. 5 billion. 7 billion consumers spent on “video game hardware, content, and accessories” in 2025. Physical game sales are already a smaller chunk of overall game spending than vinyl is for music, and that’s before PlayStation game discs go away entirely in 2028. Game discs becoming vinyl would actually be a rosier outlook than where things currently seem to be trending.
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