PlayStation physical shares, FC 27 Ultimate Plus, and The Odyssey boosts Assassin’s Creed
Why physical splits matter, EA's new $150 FC 27 tier, and how Christopher Nolan gave AC Odyssey a massive engagement surge.
I’m currently on holiday in Canada, so we’re only doing one newsletter this week and next! Couldn’t leave you hanging, could we!?
Lots to cover this week, so let’s dive in!
The variation in PlayStation physical splits is pretty wild
Now that Sony has confirmed it’s taking physical discs behind the shed in 2028, its physical splits are worth a proper look. Sony knew a vocal minority of superfans would be mad, but they did it anyway for a simple reason. Margin.
While I’m no fan of this decision as a consumer, the data explains the boardroom math. Here are our estimates for the physical share of copies sold across ten high-profile PlayStation titles over the past couple of years:
The range is enormous, running from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth at 48.0% physical down to Black Myth: Wukong at 10.8%. That spread reveals a lot about who still gives a shite about discs:
The top of the list is collector territory, the prestige single-player epics (FF7 Rebirth, Astro Bot, Spider-Man 2, Expedition 33) that we older heads want sitting on our shelves.
Then, the bottom belongs to digital natives like Black Myth: Wukong (a PC-first title with a massive China audience used to digital downloads) and Madden 26 (an annual live-service game nobody keeps a box for). Most recent annual sports games land at a similar physical share.
Third-party publishers are obviously chuffed behind the scenes because of the underlying unit economics. On a standard $70 first-party game, a disc sale nets Sony roughly $45 after retail’s cut and manufacturing. A digital sale keeps effectively the full $70, yielding a 54% jump per copy.
Sony’s internal numbers clearly show that any unit sales lost by killing the disc drive will be far smaller than that 54% margin uplift. For third-party games, the gap is smaller but still significant: ~$35 on a disc versus ~$49 digital (a ~40% uplift). $80 base prices widen that absolute cash gap on every single converted sale.
Extrapolating this across a full catalogue shows why Sony pulled the trigger. Sony wants Steam-style catalogue margins, so they are cutting an increasingly small, low-margin retail channel to force everyone into a storefront they fully control, pocketing the retail cut on every transaction.
FF7 Rebirth at 48% physical means nearly half its buyers ran through the lowest-margin channel. Push even a chunk of those buyers to digital, and per-copy revenue on that group jumps by half.
But I reckon it’s a bit short-sighted, and that might even be by design.
This is more of a stopgap than a strategy
This is short-term margin harvesting during a rough period. It’s PlayStation buying time. The bet is that today’s cost squeeze is a phase and not a permanent state. Hopefully, the component crisis eases once the AI-datacentre gold rush stops devouring the world’s memory and storage supply, hardware gets cheaper to make again, and the macro picture (interest rates, cost-of-living pressure on discretionary spend) softens.
Going disc-less keeps revenue-per-player growing through that, propping up the numbers while the underlying economics are ugly, so that when conditions do normalise, PlayStation comes out the other side with margins intact and the business still showing growth. It’s a bridge across the bad years. The risk, of course, is that the bridge doesn’t reach anywhere better.
And another important bridge will also get burned in the process.
Budget-conscious and younger players enter the console ecosystem through cheap pre-owned discs, then get locked in by buying digital DLC, subscribing to PS Plus, and building a friend list they won’t walk away from.
Killing physical media boards up one of the cheapest doorways into PlayStation. In a gen where consoles cost $700+ and games hit $80, kicking down the cheap ladder accelerates audience split. Outside of the sports games, casuals and youngsters will drift off to mobile, PC, and free-to-play even faster.
Squeezing every buyer onto high-margin digital channels is what platform holders do when underlying console economics are under pressure. Component inflation, ballooning AAA budgets, flat install bases, and post-pandemic readjustment are part of this.
So no discs will shore up revenue per player today, but the funnel feeding the platform tomorrow shrinks.
If console hardware costs ever drop, this looks short-sighted. If they don’t, it looks like managed decline. Either way, it’s a lever pulled under heavy pressure. And it’s a new base line in a world where the number needs to keep going up.
Speaking of which…
FC 27 is going even more Ultimate-er
EA has added a $150 Ultimate Plus edition for FC 27 on top of the Standard and Ultimate editions. It’s a telling case study in where premium SKUs are heading.
Traditional collector’s editions used to sell physical stuff: statues, steelbooks, art books, and physical merchandise with real production costs. Ultimate Plus at $150 is almost entirely in-game economy fuel: five seasons of Premium Passes (versus one on the Ultimate edition), 10,000 FC Points across five monthly drops, a Hall of FUT player pick, and a stack of head-start boosts.
Collector’s editions have morphed from physical merch upsells into pure digital ARPU extraction and FOMO weaponisers. GTA 6 executed a softer version: an accessible $80 base to protect the top of the funnel, paired with a pricier edition to milk die-hard pre-orders.
With FC 27 Ultimate Plus, EA is selling time and FOMO. Ultimate Plus grants up to seven days of early access (from 18 September, versus the 25 September global launch), which hardcore FUT players view as a non-negotiable competitive edge.
Early spenders take time off work (I’ve got a nasty cold!), build squads, and corner the transfer market before the general population logs in. EA doubled down on that pressure by locking Ultimate Plus behind a strict pre-order window (23 July to 31 August). Miss that window, and you cannot buy it or upgrade into it. Nintendo has
Artificial scarcity converts hesitation into an immediate $150 purchase. For a big-spending FUT player operating in that live economy, paying $150 to start ahead of everyone is an easy yes. Streamers give it a megaphone, pressuring younger players to bug their parents for the upgrade.
Nintendo has dabbled with this kind of scarcity in the past, too. I actually made an incredibly awkward YouTube video about this during the pandemic. Enjoy, thumbnail ‘n all:
Anyway … EA is deeply console-first with its sports titles, but the console install base is flat. Add expensive hardware and a $55B leveraged buyout to service, and EA cannot rely on growing unit volume. When you can’t grow the audience, you’ve gotta grow revenue per player instead.
This permanently resets the pricing floor. Once a $150 tier normalises, it becomes the baseline to build on. The FC 26 progression paywall backlash showed that EA will push until players revolt, walk it back slightly, and then re-establish the new boundary next cycle. Ultimate Plus WILL make money this year. The question is what FC 28 looks like now that $150 is the benchmark and NuMbEr MuSt gO uP.
Ultimate Plus PLUS when?
Christopher Nolan just gave Assassin’s Creed Odyssey its best engagement week in years
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hit cinemas on 17 July, and the cultural spillover into games was immediate. Players naturally connected the film’s classical Greek setting to Ubisoft’s 2018 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
Combined daily active users (DAUs) across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation sat around 122K on 17 July. By 27 July, ten days after the film opened, they hit 233K. That’s a 90% surge in engagement (+110K daily players), at 1.8x the game’s pre-film July baseline.
Looking at the platform split:
Steam picked up 26%.
PlayStation nearly doubled (+94% to 114K DAUs).
Xbox exploded (+134% from 36K to 84K DAUs, a 2.5x jump over its baseline).
Subscriptions drove this spike on console, as per our estimates. Because AC Odyssey is on both Game Pass and PS Plus, many curious moviegoers faced zero financial friction to start playing. Lapsed fans jumped straight back in, while new players found a 60+ hour Greek epic waiting inside a subscription they already pay for.
Software sales moved modestly at around 400K copies year-to-date, but the real here is pure player engagement. The film didn’t make millions buy an eight-year-old game, but it got a massive cohort playing it again. That data gives Ubisoft great ammunition for an eventual AC Odyssey Resynced.
Credit to Ubisoft for leaning into the momentum. They ran timed social campaigns alongside Nolan’s release and resurfaced Discovery Tour (the guided, combat-free educational mode), positioning it as an interactive companion piece for anyone falling down a history rabbit hole after leaving the cinema.
Well played, Ubisoft, congrats, Nolan, and unlucky, anti-woke brigade.
Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free?
We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies.
Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up.
The last word
Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover.
[Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]