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?
This is so much bigger than the secondary resale market, which is a small added bonus for them
The move from physical media; the price of computer components rising beyond reasonable levels; the locking down of hardware; the locking down of software distribution methods; the inevitability of de-anonymizing all Internet users…
The capitalist class has had enough of your criticism. We discovered their little criminal playground that preyed on children, we discovered how they hide their wealth without contributing back to society, we even discovered how government programs meant to “keep us safe” are used to exploit everyone on earth.
You think Sony ending physical discs is about video games? Brother it’s about the mind prison they’re designing to keep you in line while they fuck preteens on yachts until this whole planet burns to the ground
Extrapolating a consumer usability problem into grandiose, vague fearmongering of the ultra-rich Epstein class isn’t helping anyone. It’s more likely to make people defeatist.
If you actually care about things like tax havens, or believe they have a relation to this issue, show people what they can do to fight them.
Dave’s not here man
Gamestop has become TOO POWERFUL!
given who’s running that show these days, i wouldn’t shed a tear if they got run out of business.
That power up rewards card was more powerful than we all thought I guess.
Killing ownership is the objective, killing the secondary market is collateral
Same for every industry, that means we know what we need to focus on
🏴☠️
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They could have used the carrot, but pure greed means they’re now opting for the stick.
By raising the prices for all their games, raising them again for physical copies, and allowing the use of game key cards, Nintendo decided the carrot or stick alone just wasn’t profitable enough, and thus chose both.
That… uh… what?
Do you not understand the “carrot and stick” metaphor?
You listed three times Nintendo used the “stick” then claimed they opted to use both, I assume in an attempt to sound clever.
Does everyone on this platform have long covid or something, because these replies are really worrying!
Anyway, yeah, Nintendo suck ass, well done.
The $60 → $70 price increase was just Nintendo being greedy, so the metaphorical “carrot” in this context is raising the price of physical copies to $80 to make the digital price seem like a good deal in comparison (diminishing physical sales further as an excuse to get rid of them entirely), while the “stick” is the game key cards that take any meaning away from owning physical media in the first place.
In any case, disagreement is no reason to insult the intelligence of other users.
Fair enough, sorry.
I had just finished reading the top voted response, which says Sony killing discs is about billionaires fucking children and may have misdirected my consternation toward you.
You can still resell the game key card, so it doesn’t kill the secondary market, though…
They will still become worthless once Nintendo shuts down the Switch 2 servers, making piracy the only viable form of game preservation at that point beyond whichever means Nintendo will have to get people to buy the games a second time on a new platform.
You’re right. It is still a bit better than full digital game.
Same thing happened to the home video market. No more dvd sales and resales. Everything gets funneled into subscriptions.
This killed a lot of Indy films and films that had weak releases can no longer recoup any money via dvd sales. So more of those films simply don’t get made anymore
Weirdly, things are kinda of reversed in this situation.
To address things in backwards, digital platforms have been a massive boon to smaller studios due to not having to front the cost for manufacturing. It allows them to take creative risks and reach broader audiences.
As for the comparison to the DVD and Blu-Ray market, things sort of happened slowly and more “naturally” in that case. The market died because streaming offered a significant value to customers so they moved away of their own accord. It was a slow process and it took years before the downsides became apparent.
With games, the platform holders and publishers haven’t bothered to offer any additional value for going digital, quite the opposite really. So the physical market has endured, and the resale market with it. Instead of learning any lessons or competing on value, they’ve decided to force the issue and just kill off the format itself.
One was a death, the other is an execution.
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.
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.
We must get more casual users here to balance it out
Capitalism loves planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and rental everything.
they want us to pay constantly, forever.
it will not stop unless its stopped.
Rent Extraction is the objective, and I partly disagree that killing the secondary market is the blanket objective. Look at ticketmaster. They sell the tickets, then they also take fees on the resale of those same tickets purchased by customers/scalpers. They profit twice thanks to the secondary market. Doesn’t work (yet) for something like books, but give it time.
The general objective is to force everything to subscription and also force upgrades thanks to them controlling EOL for everything. They never want to give users the ability to run their own servers for sunsetted services.
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?
No, but the fediverse has a good portion of the crazier parts of the left wing (and they are very vocal). If it bothers you, go heavy on blocking the worst offenders and you’ll find that most lemmings are pretty chill. We’re “just” nuts enough stray from the mainstream platforms where most normies hang out.
I for one look forward to the day when I can recommend the fediverse to at least my left-wing friends w/o them questioning my sanity.
When I was young we used rent games from the stores. Just sayin
Steam very successfully destroyed the resale and lending of PC games and the same approach with digital rights management of downloads will do the same to the consoles.
Used games held the console market in balance. You knew if you didn’t like a game, you could trade it and get something back, or at least buy a cheap used copy if you weren’t sure on a title.
The PC game market is kept in balance by constant discounting and availability. You manage risk by saying “I’ll wait a few years and get it for $4.98 instead.”
The presence of secomdary sellers (Fanatical, Humble Bundle etc) and even distinct markets (GoG, itch, service games that sell through their own accounts) means Steam still doesn’t have the same market-defining power Sony will in a post-disc world.
single-use codes and ‘activation’ were around and gaining traction before steam came about. but steam did help dig the hole and put the some of the nails in the coffin.
Not 100%, you can share your (almost) whole digital Steam game library via family share. There are very few games that block this feature.
Dude cdkeys were already a thing before steam. There wasn’t really ever a secondhand pc game market.
Of course there was. It was very much alive on our schoolyard. (A “market” doesn’t need a man in the middle siphoning off a profit for it to exist.)
You could write down CD keys and put them in the case, you know?
That didn’t work. If you tried to play online with a CD key that someone else had already used, it wouldn’t let you.
That was a small minority of games. There were video games before everybody had the internet. But even later, not every game is or was an online game. Actually most weren’t, because plans were expensive and connection quality was horseshit. Also, games used to support player run dedicated servers where no such checks existed. Hell, you didn’t even have to use the game’s own server browsers in many cases, there were 3rd party solutions for that.
There were actually a lot of online games back in the day since lan was pretty common, but your point is mostly valid. Unless the game had online features the cdkey could be reused.
It worked with some games! I remember passing around CS1.5 and UT CD keys at LAN parties.
I’m not convinced it wasn’t mostly dead before Steam, TBH. I mean I guess there was “lending” (read: copying), but there was never a “GameStop for PC games” the way there was for console games. And even the “lending” was somewhat curtailed by CD-keys and account registration before Steam existed.
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There is such a huge library of games made over the previous 30ish years. We really need new console games? Fuck it. Bring back vintage games. They were fun then and they are fun now
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