After seeing these numbers Marek posted, it's time to have a controversial conversation about physical game retailers.
Stores like GameStop and Walmart do absolutely zero development work, take on zero creative risk, and don't finance a single pixel of the actual game. Yet under the legacy physical model, these retailers step in at the last second to siphon up to 35% of the game's revenue, just for shipping or letting a plastic box sit on a shelf.
In a modern industry where production budgets have reached hundreds of millions of dollars, this leeching makes no sense for publishers and developers. When Take-Two spent an estimated 1 to 3 billion dollars to make GTA6, wanting digital sales makes total sense for ROI.
At $69.99, retail margin takes 25-35%, distributors another 10-20%, and physical production ~$10. That leaves studios with just over $26 per unit — compared to ~$49 on digital at highest margin.
It only gets worse as prices drop. Large publishers sit on the better side of the equation, but even they make significantly more per digital sale. From a pure ROI standpoint, the choice is obvious.