Strauss Zelnick had some numbers to share during Take-Two's latest earnings call, and honestly they paint a pretty clear picture of where game sales are going. The publisher's net bookings projection for fiscal 2027 is sitting at $8.2 billion, and when someone asked about the split between physical and digital Zelnick confirmed sales are "well over 90% digital," according to Eurogamer.

Nobody who's been paying attention should be shocked by that number. We've all been watching the shift happen in real time for years. But hearing it stated that plainly from the head of the company publishing one of the most anticipated games in recent memory, it hits different.

Think about your own habits for a second. When was the last time you actually went to a store to buy a game? My PS5 doesn't even have a disc drive. Half my Discord server pre-loads everything the second a pre-order goes live. Nobody's waiting in midnight release lines anymore. We're all watching a download bar at 11:58 PM.

For a game like GTA 6, which has been building hype for what feels like forever, that 90% digital figure makes perfect sense. Players want to play the second the clock strikes release. Physical discs mean logistics and shipping and stores being open, and hoping your copy actually arrived. Digital means you're in Los Santos the moment the servers go live.

The revised $8.2 billion bookings target for 2027 is a staggering number, and it reflects what Take-Two expects from a year that should include the full weight of GTA 6's launch. Take-Two has been building toward this for a while and the financial projections show just how much is riding on Rockstar's next entry.

What I keep thinking about though is what this means for game preservation down the road. I wrote recently about five Xbox 360 classics you can't play anymore on modern hardware, and the common thread there was digital delisting and server shutdowns. When 90% of sales are digital, the lifespan of a game becomes tied to whether a publisher keeps it available. Physical copies at least exist as artifacts you can still track down and play years later. A delisted digital game just vanishes.

That's not a knock on digital gaming itself. The convenience is real and I'm not going to pretend I don't love instant access to everything. But there's a tension here that the whole gaming community is going to have to wrestle with more and more as physical becomes the exception rather than the rule.

For now though, Take-Two is betting enormous money on a digital-first future, and GTA 6 is going to be the biggest test case we've ever seen for what that looks like at scale.

Are you going physical on GTA 6, or are you already pre-loaded and ready to go digital? I know what my guild's Discord server looks like on this one but I'm curious where you land.