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?
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.
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.
It worked with some games! I remember passing around CS1.5 and UT CD keys at LAN parties.
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. Actuauly 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.
What?!
You think before Steam people could resell and loan PC games like console?!
Why just make shit up? You know Steam ain’t that old and people remember pre-Steam…
Right?
I think steam might be older than BrightCandle@lemmy.world…
You forgot the leading
@and your username mention turned into a mailto link.Not 100%, you can share your (almost) whole digital Steam game library via family share. There are very few games that block this feature.
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.
G*mers made their bed. And are now complaining that it smells like their shit.