Physical/Digital Game Sales Statistics
In 2012 there was no Series S and no all digital PS5. There were no riots in the streets when these consoles were announced. You can see that digital sales have increased markedly since then. The market is slowly changing. Remember that Nintendo is a business, and while you or I may want a physical box, they make more money and simplify the device greatly by going digital. I can understand skepticism that they'll go all digital, but the complete dismissal of the very notion is bonkers. There are people literally playing games on a Series S console or Steamdeck right now and the world hasn't exploded.
Oh, there was plenty of teeth-gnashing over the mere existence of these options, as if they were an encroaching threat on physical. But they're still
options to consumers, not mandatory. It's also worth noting that the split between the disc and non-disc version of PS5 isn't even close, the disc-less PS5 only makes up 13.87% of life-to-date sales of PS5 in Japan. Series S would likely fare similarly were it not for Game Pass and, were they available, the digital sales figures for individual games are likely reflective of that.
Also, the stats you provided are not console-specific and rely heavily on mobile F2P revenue, so they're pretty useless for this discussion.
When the digital-only hardware becomes the ONLY hardware option as you're suggesting, there will undoubtedly be a repeat of the furor surrounding Xbox One.
I completely forgot about that. And this must be kind of a pain considering how weak the switch CPU is (and how games only have access to 3 of them anyways).
So what are the options switch devs have nowadays the moment they have the original DAW project in hands and are about to export the media with the cartridge storage limit in mind?
Well, as I said, audio compression isn't usually a thing that game developers concern themselves with. The absolute biggest savings in package size has frequently been smaller FMV files (with hardware acceleration for VP9 in Switch and for the superior AV1 in the next hardware) and textures (of which there's too many options to count, with varying levels of CPU/GPU hit and performance; PS5, for example, utilizes hardware acceleration for
Oodle, which offers data and texture-specific compression techniques). While there's been a lot of movement in those 2 areas (as there should be, given their impact of the number of GBs they make up in a package), audio compression through lossless codecs is kinda the final frontier when it comes to decreasing video game package size and no one is quick to make a move there, despite a push to offer multiple audio tracks for spoken dialogue as part of language support causing audio to creep up the ranks as a major source of package size.
Options for audio in console games are pretty limited if they don't want an additional hit to the CPU or GPU. Most of it ends up as uncompressed PCM 5.1 audio in whatever format is recommended by the hardware manufacturer (typically AIFF or AU for consoles, if I remember right).
This isn't to say that there are no compression options, audio files can still be compressed at a file level and be decompressed during loading times before being sent to RAM, but it's not as good a compression rate as you'd see with the use of a codec and those audio files would have to remain in RAM until a new loading sequence to ensure decompressing an audio file mid-gameplay does not put pressure on any CPU intensive gameplay sequence. For some games, that's likely not a concern, but when we're talking about games with larger package sizes, the likelihood that the CPU is in pretty active use rises substantially and rules out the option.