Circana: game-key cards drive US physical game spending up 5% in 2026
Circana says US spending on new physical videogames is up 5% year to date in 2026, led by a 631% surge in game-key cards.
- The market research firm says the growth is being driven mainly by game-key cards, which are up 631% year over year.
- Mat Piscatella says there were 10 Game-Key Card titles last year and 54 additional Game-Key Card titles have appeared this year.
What happened
Circana has reported, according to Kotaku, that US consumer spending on new physical videogames in 2026 is up 5% so far compared with the same period last year. It marks a notable reversal in a market that has been under pressure for some time, according to the same analysis.
Circana says the growth is being driven mainly by game-key cards, a physical release format that is appearing more often on Nintendo Switch 2. In the figures cited by Kotaku, spending on game-key cards rose 631% year over year, while the rest of the physical market fell 3%.
Mat Piscatella, senior director at Circana, says 10 titles were released as Game-Key Cards last year and that 54 additional Game-Key Card titles have appeared this year. According to him, growth in new physical software is visible for the first time in more than a decade.
Piscatella links that development to two factors: the arrival of Switch 2 and the fact that publishers are increasingly choosing game-key cards. The source provided does not name an exact Circana dataset or report title for the 5% and 631% figures.
Timeline
2025: Circana counts 10 titles released as Game-Key Cards, according to Piscatella.
2026: Piscatella says 54 additional Game-Key Card titles have appeared this year.
August 2026: Circana says total content spending in the US fell 10%.
2026 to date: US spending on new physical videogames is up 5% year over year, with game-key cards as the main growth driver.
Background
In this context, the term game-key card refers to a physical package that does not contain the full game on the cartridge, but mainly serves as a key for download and activation. The source material does not provide an official Circana definition of the category, so the exact scope of the figures remains unclear.
The August figure shows that the broader content market was down 10% that month, mainly because of a sharp drop in mobile spending. In the supplied text, the sentence about console and PC spending is cut off, so only the decline in the total content market in August is confirmed.
The link to Nintendo Switch 2 matters because game-key cards are used there more often than in earlier physical releases. Kotaku bases the analysis on Circana figures and a response from Mat Piscatella, but the underlying report is not fully visible in the material provided.