Physical Game Spending Just Rose for the First Time Since 2009
US physical game spending rose 3% to $1.6 billion in the year to May 2026, its first annual growth since 2009, driven almost entirely by the Switch 2.
For the first time since 2009, Americans spent more on physical games than they did the year before. Not much more, but more, and after seventeen straight years of the line pointing down, the direction is the news.
The figure comes from Circana, the market research firm that tracks US game spending. According to its data, physical software pulled in $1.6 billion in the twelve months ending May 2026, up 3% year on year. The last time that number grew at all, boxed games were a roughly $11.5 billion business and the industry had not yet decided that discs were a problem to be solved.
I want to be honest about what this is, because the easy version of this story is wrong. This is not the industry rediscovering its love of physical media. Circana’s Mat Piscatella was clear that the increase is almost entirely a Nintendo story. Physical software on Nintendo platforms is up around 26% year on year, carried by the Switch 2 launch, and even that figure still sits below where Nintendo’s physical sales were two years ago. Strip out the new console and the boxed market is doing what it has done for most of a generation.
So no, this is not a turning of the tide. But it is something. The collapse of physical was supposed to be a one-way trip. Every year the share got smaller, every year the argument for buying a box got harder to make, and the assumption baked into all of it was that the line only goes down. This is the first year in a long time that the assumption was wrong.
What I take from it is narrow but real. When a major publisher ships a desirable game on a cart that you actually own, people still buy the physical version in numbers large enough to move a national figure. The demand did not evaporate. That is a very different problem than nobody wanting discs anymore, and it is the version of the story the digital-only crowd would rather you did not notice.
Whether the trend outlives the Switch 2’s launch window is the open question, and I will be watching the next twelve-month figure to see if this was a genuine floor or a single-console spike. Either way, for one year, the most pessimistic line in the hobby finally bent the other way.