74% of American Gamers Prefer Discs Over Digital

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There are 34 million people in U.S. who play 5-plus hours of games weekly.

By Evan Campbell

A majority of core gamers in the United States still prefer physical media when the game costs the same as the digital version, according to The NPD Group.
Seventy-four percent of American gamers say they would go with the physical edition of a game, which is possibly surprising as Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft focus more and more on game downloads and digital titles. But NPD notes that digital preferences are on the rise, up 5 percent year over year.

The global information company revealed the information in its latest report, called Core Gaming 2014, in which NPD claims there are over 34 million American people who average playing games five-plus hours per week on PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. And the company believes these stats will increase as people adopt the newer home consoles from Sony and Microsoft.
“Core gamers are an important part of the games industry, and understanding their behavior is critical to anyone invested in the games space — especially considering the launch of the new consoles and the continued evolution of digital gaming,” said industry analyst Liam Callahan.

EA chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen touched on a digital-only future late last year, and his insights line up with the NPD report findings. He believes the industry is a ways off from a digital-only future, saying at the time that he thinks “a lot of the constraint there will continue to be bandwidth into people’s homes.”
IGN also polled the community in October about going all-digital on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and over 54 percent of respondents said that they were still going to buy physical media.

Evan Campbell is a freelance news writer who streams games on his Twitch channel, talks about Nintendo weekly on the NF Show, and chats about movies and TV series on Twitter.

Originally written and published by at IGN PS3. Click here to read the original story.