How Much Longer Will Gamers Stand in Line for Blockbuster Video Games?

The last blockbuster video-game release of 2015 kicked off at midnight, when Star Wars: Battlefront went on sale. People who had lined up at stores the night before walked out with games wrapped in plastic and ran home to unwrap them and insert them into disc drives. It was positively old-fashioned.

Increasingly, this isn’t how video-game sales work. Mobile games exist only in digital form, PC games are often downloaded, and an increasing proportion of console games are purchased online, rather than at GameStop locations. The exception comes during the holiday period, high season for big-name console games, when people still flock to stores. 2015 is the biggest year yet for the newest generation of consoles, with such titles as Halo 5, Fallout 4, and Call of Duty: Black Ops III bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. It may also be the first holiday season that digital sales outpace physical sales.