After sinking to a record-low number of boxed releases in 2015, the gaming industry recovered in 2016 with a renewed focus on physical video game sales, a recent analysis on The NPD Group Blog reveals.
Industry analyst Mat Piscatella notes that gaming retail sales saw a steady decline over the last several years, with 2015 producing a total of 230 boxed releases across all platforms. Retail performance rebounded with 271 physical releases in 2016 and this year promises additional gains for an ailing industry.
Gaming’s increasing focus on digitally distributed titles began to take its toll on retail sales as early as 2010, when 742 unique releases hit retail across all gaming platforms, according to NPD’s research. The next year brought this figure down to 584 titles and 2012 saw a further decline, producing only 424 boxed releases in total.
Piscatella attributes 2016’s sudden recovery to GameStop’s newly introduced publishing initiative and the rise of independent boutique publishers.
“There are fewer publishers, and on average those remaining publishers are bringing fewer games to retail than they were at the start of the decade,” Piscatella explains. “This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in release count; one that just so happens to correlate quite well to packaged retail sales.”
Piscatella continues: “The good news is that the decline in packaged release count stopped in 2016. […] GameStop has proactively taken the steps to enter physical publishing of smaller scale digital games with GameTrust. Its first title, Insomniac’s Song of the Deep, launched in July, was supported with significant presence and promotion at retail and in consumer marketing. GameTrust also has partnerships in place with developers of digital games such as Tequila Works, Ready at Dawn and Frozenbyte.”
505 Games and Soedesco Publishing also led the charge with physical versions of formerly digital-exclusive titles like Rocket League, Terraria, Ziggurat, and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams. 505’s next digital-to-physical release, a retail PlayStation 4 version of the indie farm life sim Stardew Valley, is due to launch in April.
According to Piscatella, niche publishers and retailers alike now stand to benefit from the increased presence and variety of physical gaming releases.
“What these smaller titles can do is generate additional sales of the games themselves while at the same time driving traffic to the video game aisle,” Piscatella projects, “leading to incremental sales of other games while re-engaging consumers that have gaming interests beyond the latest AAA big-budget shooter.”
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.