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
Alternativelly, multiple subgroups within the power elites can support some of the same things for different reasons.
It’s perfectly logical that, for example, intrusive tracking under the excuse of Age Checks “to protect the children” is supported by the Pedophiles in the Elites because it helps them detected early and suppress attempts to change the very system which gives them immunity for their crimes, non-Pedophile people in positions of power support it for very similar reasons only they want the system protected so that they can stay in power, maybe because they like power or because of the money and priviledges they get from their position in that system, and big companies selling media to users support it because it lets them more strongly bind copies of that media to specific users hence people can’t share it (for example, two sibblings in the same house using the same device can’t share a single copy of a game) so those companies sell more copies hence make more money.
Reducing most people’s choices can serve different stakeholders who have different desires and for whom that reduction of the choices of consumers serves different objectives and yields different returns.
Trying to come up with a Theory of Everything for it is excessivelly reductionist and even simplistic - just because it’s easier to get one’s mind around a “they’re all the same” explanation than around something like what I’m putting forward, doesn’t mean the former is the right explanation.
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.
!bestoflemmy@lemmy.world
Dave’s not here man