Grand Theft Auto 6 is the first major console game to release without a physical version. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick doesn’t think it’ll be the last. Physical games will hang around, but not in any mass-market sort of way. He says they’ll become closer to the equivalent of vinyl records in music.
“It may not be the end, but listen, we’ve been talking, you and I, for a long time,” he told The Game Business‘ Christopher Dring in a new interview. “I predicted that digital distribution would be well over 90 percent of the business more than 10 years ago. I don’t always get it right, but this one I got right. Will there always be some physical business? Yes, in the same way that there’s still a vinyl business in recorded music. But it’s going to be a very small part of the business.”
Physical music accounted for just over 10 percent of total music revenue in the first half of 2026, according to estimates by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). That comes out to $581 million, roughly 80 percent of which was earned through sales of vinyl.
According to Circana, physical game sales in the U.S. last year hit a 30-year low of $1.5 billion. That was about 2.5 percent of the $60.7 billion consumers spent on “video game hardware, content, and accessories” in 2025. Physical game sales are already a smaller chunk of overall game spending than vinyl is for music, and that’s before PlayStation game discs go away entirely in 2028. Game discs becoming vinyl would actually be a rosier outlook than where things currently seem to be trending.
We still don’t know how Microsoft will approach physical media with the launch of its Project Helix family of next-gen consoles, and Nintendo has confirmed it has no plans to abandon physical games during the Switch 2 era, even if it’s already taken a half-step in that direction with game key cards.
Will GTA 6 ever get a disc version? Vinyl has been a way for music lovers to immortalize their favorite albums. Surely the biggest game launch ever deserves something similar? Zelnick previously shot down rumors that GTA 6 wasn’t coming to disc. He’s now demurred on whether it could get a physical release in the future. That sort of “information always comes from our labels,” he told Variety this week, leaving the ball in Rockstar’s court to decide.
GTA 6 is getting a vinyl release for its soundtrack, however. Seem a bit hypocritical? It’s probably less surprising when, as revealed in Take-Two’s latest financials, only 2 percent of its current revenue comes from game discs.
