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 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.
Switch to pc. Walled gardens are inherently problematic.
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.
they want us to pay constantly, forever.
it will not stop unless its stopped.
Most users on this platform are batshit mentally insane leftists, yes.
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.
Killing ownership is the objective, killing the secondary market is collateral
Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?
Many people here are. People will lash out over the smallest thing. There are a lot of cool people too, but I highly advise using the block feature liberally. The jerks can really be a buzzkill as they truly love to judge your entire life by one comment and they truly love to imagine you’re the worst version of you they can imagine. So yeah, strap in. I think overall, the communities here are worth it, but there are times that assholes make me doubt that. Block instances, communities, and users who make you feel that way. It’s definitely a far superior experience to reddit even given the assholes, though.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Well, I belong to that club myself. Although for a stupid fucking reason.
Is everyone on this platform fucking mental?
Capitalism loves planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and rental everything.
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.
Their greatest competition is games that already exist. They want to transition to experiences as the service, to ensure you can’t provide yourself with an experience that doesn’t get them paid. This is much wider than video games, it’s all media, from books to movies to music to videos games to dating and relationships. Controlling everything we value is the goal.
I saw another comment on lemmy that was like “everything you like in life is a market inefficiency”
Capital must consume even the universal soup!!
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.
