As far as publishers are concerned, the single greatest cancer they face is the resale market. When a store sells a new game for £60, the publisher makes about £20, and the store gets between £15-20, depending on how they choose to price it. The rest is the cost of manufacturing and shipping. (These are rounded estimates, it varies)
Then, a week later, when someone trades that game in and the store resells it for $40, they get all of that, and the publisher gets nothing.
From their perspective, that’s basically theft, which is why they’ve been trying for decades to put a stop to it, which they can’t, or at least make more money from secondary sales by bundling single-use codes for “bonus” content that really should be part of the main game, which people who buy preowned will have to shell out extra for.
So that’s what getting rid of physical media is all about. If they get rid of the discs and cartridges, that market vanishes.
Please don’t mistake this explanation as an excuse. All of the platform holders have had the means to kill off the retail market and usher customers onto their digital storefronts for at least a decade. All they had to do was pass on even a fraction of the savings they make selling digitally, which cuts out the manufacturing, shipping, and retailer costs, onto the customer. But they haven’t. Games cost the same on the Playstation Store as they do on the Gamestop Shelf. Sometimes more!
They could have used the carrot, but pure greed means they’re now opting for the stick.
Edit, Supplemental Question: This is my first post on Lemmy, and the responses have me wanting to clarify something- Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?
So, like, don’t buy things that aren’t worth the cost, man.
Library memberships are free.
So, I assume you’re making the point that, instead of buying games I should just get a library card and borrow them for free?
Well for one, that’s not a service all libraries offer, but even if they did, you’re raising it in response to a discussion about physical media being phased out.
How is “just get a library card” gonna solve the problem when the libraries won’t have a disc for me to borrow?
Or you might just be making the point that games are dumb and we should just read books. Hard to tell.
I was not making either of those points. My first sentence was my point. My second sentence was a general statement implied to be a suggestion.
But I see from the votes that lemmy is full of people who prefer to throw money away.
So is piracy.
Lemmy truly is a psychotic leftist’s playground
It happened to PC games. Sure, Steam will do a big sale twice a year, but you hear about people with massive libraries of games that they’ve never played and can’t get rid of. In ye olden times, they’d be in the game shop used bin.
Switch to pc. Walled gardens are inherently problematic.
While usually good advice, that is a pretty tone deaf thing to say to someone complaining specifically about the death of physical media.
When I was young we used rent games from the stores. Just sayin
Fucking obviously…
Did people really just figure out their hate for discs was the hate for resellers and rentals?
Fucking hell man, next you’re gonna tell us they sell consoles at a lost to trap consumers in their ecosystem of expensive games and not out of the goodness of their heart.
If you just fucking realized this, it’s better than not.
But it doesn’t mean you should be listened to, because everyone that actually cares enough to string two thoughts together figured this out fucking years/decades ago.
Sorry but I must ban your PSN, XBox and Steam account because of this comment. It’s not my fault. People told me to do it. All your digital purchases are gone Sir.
Bold of you to say “people”.
Your account has been banned by an algorithm.
The algorithm will now take every attempt to communicate why you were banned as “suspicious activity” and ban you again.
Your IP has been logged, and all future accounts will be banned.
Please have your agentic AI log your proof of citizenship with the authorities for review and social re-education.
Sorry but I can’t confirm that you’re human. Place certified PlayStation controller in your mouth, grab your right ear with your left hand, wave into camera with your right hand. Press ready button when you’re ready.
This is about removing any and all ownership rights of buyers.
Not just of selling you copy second hand but also things like lending (even to your own family), gifting and even playing it in a different device
Mandatory Age Checks on the device also helps with stopying lending even to members of your family that live with you and use the same device to play the game: if the hardware (with the excuse of Age Checking) identifies the user, then the copy can be bound to a specific person in a specific devive rather than the device alone, so for example two siblings in the same household need to buy two copies to play it even at different times rather than just one copy as the “age check” identifies the user and only allows a specific user for a specific copy.
The fewer rights buyers de facto have, the more copies publishers sell as users can’t get the games by alternative legal means, and whilst at first there might be some backlash from taking those rights away, in my experience not only are most gamers sheeple or at best dogs that bark a lot but don’t bite, but usually they over time get used to not having those rights (especially as new, younger people, who grew up without having had them become gamers), so pretty much all backlash from taking those rights away eventually dissapears and those companies end up making more money than before.
In regards to your edit: lemmy is quickly becoming an echo chamber of extreme pov’s and hot takes. You take the Reddit refugees and the Reddit banned users but leave the major casual users behind you get a lot of opinionated reactionary people in a relatively small place. Combine that with independently ran and lightly moderated servers.
I’ve been here for a while and at risk of sounding typical and repetitive of users of other platforms, it’s becoming shitty.
I honestly think every single platform that uses a vote score system is inherently susceptible to becoming an echo chamber.
The only value a vote score generates is consensus and IMO it’s not worth the cost.
Vote scores influence readers before they even engage the content. It lowers the bar of participation, partly by removing the necessity of commenting approval/disapproval, and secondarily by making approval/disapproval anonymous.
Ultimately it makes it easier for people to participate without actually contributing. It equates thoughtful with thoughtless engagement that lowers the quality of the end result.
I agree. I think hacker news does it well. No downvotes and upvotes are publicly hidden.
I could see vote score being a valuable moderation tool on the backend.
We must get more casual users here to balance it out
I’ve seen the something similar on Mastodon. It’s become colonized by some of the worst of Twitter’s offal. A lot of them moved over to Bluesky, but I’ve seen a return since that platform’s shittiness finally emerged. Negative and fear-mongering news posts as well as entitled snark. It’s still better than the alternatives, but I’m starting to think that maybe the algorithms were only part of the overall problem… But at least I have the means to moderate what I see.
Thank you for the insight. I had no clue about the news on my own
G*mers spent two decades filling their digital libraries. Killing brick and mortar stores. Pirating games.
And now they complain about the lack of physical releases by a company they claim to hate?
Thats bullshit.
Gamestop killed physical stores. They bought out who they could, and did everything they could to crush the rest and push them out of business, until nothing but gamestop was left. and gamestop is an awful fucking company.
So, of course, perpetually online idiots decided to worship it and turn it into a meme stock that brought in unfathomable amounts of undeserved money.
Most users on this platform are batshit mentally insane leftists, yes.
Lemmy is pretty much composed of people who were banned on reddit.
They could have been banned for disagreeing with dickish mod… or for being asshole themselves.
Some of us quit when we couldn’t use RiF. Literally dozens of us
Make that dozens +1.
Well, I belong to that club myself. Although for a stupid fucking reason.
So many simps for valve who don’t understand how valve fucked us all 20 years ago.
Just remember if valve cared at fucking skill they could offer you a resellable license.
But yeah, fuck Windows, because reasons. Lemmy.txt
I don’t want to resell anything, I don’t care.
Valve has been very good to me. I can plan by my library on any machine I want anywhere I want. They have kept titles available for me to download that the publisher took down.
They keep my save files, they provide overlays in game, they provide a game recording and chat system.
Everything I buy from them is so deeply narked down that reselling isn’t even worthwhile anyways.
On top of all of that they contribute to a free os, including giving back upstream.
That’s not dumping, those are just facts. Basically so far it’s the best gaming service yet.
I do worry it will go away, but all the games are also backed up locally so it really doesn’t matter that much.
By the way: Valve works well in conjunction with game devs. My kids buy box sets that come with physical items (guides, books, stickers, figures, and discs) AND have valve keys. So they get the best of both worlds. Supporting indy devs is far more important than arguing about valves position in all of this.
You okay?
they want us to pay constantly, forever.
it will not stop unless its stopped.
