Walmart will likely make a big move when it comes to how it sells Xbox games. According to Josh Fairhurst of Limited Run Games, Walmart will stop selling Xbox discs in 2024. He made this claim after a report came out that Best Buy will stop selling physical media in the first quarter of next year.ย
It’s not clear why Xbox is being singled out by Walmart, but as ComicBook.com pointed out, Xbox has Xbox Series S which is a digital-only console. That means a portion of Xbox games aren’t even able to be bought physically, but the trend could continue a few years down the road as more gamers will download games instead of buying physical copies.ย
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One person on social media asked Fairhurst about just Xbox games being dropped by Walmart. “That’s my understanding as far as Wal-Mart is concerned, but I’d expect deeper changes in their gaming department as time goes on,” Fairhurst wrote. “Retail is becoming more and more challenging and in-store game sales are declining, only makes sense they’ll reduce the department in time.”
Fairhurst also talked about the future of Nintendo while answering a question from another social media user. He said: “I think Nintendo will hang on to physical for a few more hardware generations and most of our sales are on Nintendo platforms. This is something I’m always thinking about, though.”
Earlier this month, Chris Early, the vice president of strategic partnerships and business development at Ubisoft, said there will always be a market for physical video games. “There’s a collector edition market,” Early said, per ComicBook.com. “There’s the aspect of gifting physical items and allowing access for people to be able to easily purchase a game in a store and gift them to their friends or family. Some people will always want to own the physical disk. I just don’t think it’s going away. Do I think physical sales might get lower over time? Sure, but will it ever completely go away? I don’t think so.”
If anything, gamers can get a lot of money for a physical copy of an older video game. In 2021, it was announced that someone paid $2 million for an unopened 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game cartridge, which is a world record.ย
